The story of Unbroken, written by Laura Hillenbrand, details the life of Louis “Louie” Zamperini, from his rise to Olympic hero to his life as an American soldier in World War II. Against unimaginable odds, Louie pushed his will beyond the limits of his body and mind to allow his spirit to never be broken. His is a story of strength, courage, and redemption in the midst of madness.
As a young boy, Louie was known as the town terror in Torrance, California, a neighborhood south of Los Angeles, where his family moved in 1919 when he was two. Louie was a notorious thief and prankster and had trouble fitting in at school. He was often the victim of bullying, but he never cowered in the face of danger.
As a teenager, Louie was restless and sick of living a life of rules and restrictions. When his antics got him suspended from school, he was banned from participating in athletic activities. His older brother, Pete, a model student and athlete, knew Louie needed direction. He convinced the principal to let him join the track team and took responsibility for Louie’s training. Still, he couldn’t get Louie to engage. Louie left home at the age of sixteen.
After only a few days on the road, Louie realized he was wasting his life. He returned home, agreed to let Pete train him, and found he had a tremendous talent for running. Louie started competing in the mile and two-mile races, quickly making a name for himself with his impressive speed. Soon, he was beating college runners as a high school senior, and he received a scholarship to run at USC.
Louie had set his sights on another target. He wanted to run in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. All of Louie’s training was focused on getting him to the Olympics, and his dream became a reality when he came in second at the trials. Although Louie didn’t medal at the games, he drew attention by clocking the fastest final lap in history up to that point. Even Hitler was impressed.
Louie wasn’t satisfied with his finish at the Olympics and quickly set his mind to training and winning the mile at the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki. Those Olympics would never occur. Shortly after the 1936 games, Germany invaded Poland, setting off the events that led to WWII. As America drew closer to involvement in the war, Congress passed a draft bill with a caveat that anyone who enlisted before the draft was enacted could choose which branch they joined. To avoid random selection, Louie enlisted with the United States Air Force and went to basic training.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1942 catapulted the United States into the war and Louie into active combat. He was made a bombardier and put on a crew slated to fly bombers known as B-24s. The pilot of Louie’s crew was a young man from Indiana named Phil, and the two became close friends.
Louie and Phil’s crew flew in two significant missions that helped destroy Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. On the last of these missions, their plane, the Super Man, was so badly destroyed, it was beyond repair. The crew were given a new plane, an old B-24 named the Green Hornet that was missing several parts. During a rescue mission, the Green Hornet experienced technical difficulties and went down in the Pacific ocean. Only Louie, Phil, and a man named Mac survived.
For forty-two days, Louie and the other two men drifted on two inflatable rafts in the middle of the Pacific ocean. There had been rescue missions to locate them, but they weren’t found. The men’s food and water supplies dwindled quickly, and after only a week, they were without either. For the next month, they survived by syphoning rain water into bottles, killing birds for food, and fishing with small bits of bait.
Many dangers befell the men on the boat. They were close to the equator, and the sun blazed down on them daily, weakening them and burning their skin. They suffered sores from the salt water, and sharks circled their boats daily. A Japanese fighter plane shot at them four times, but no one was hit. The assault damaged one of the rafts beyond repair, and all three men were forced to layer themselves in one raft the size of a bathtub.
All of the men were emaciated and weak, but Mac suffered the worst. He eventually died on the raft, and Louie and Phil gave him a burial at sea.
On their second-to-last day at sea, a great typhoon threatened to capsize the boat. Louie prayed to God to save them and promised to serve him always if he did. The storm pushed them toward land. Salvation was finally in sight. They’d drifted two thousand miles from the crash site.
Louie and Phil rowed their raft toward the cluster of the Marshall Islands. They were grateful for land, but they knew they were in enemy territory. They would have to go ashore and hide until they could find a safe village. However, before they could reach shore, a Japanese ship pulled beside them and brought them aboard. This would be the last free moment of either man’s life for two years.
After being captured, the two men were interrogated and taken to a secret POW camp called Ofuna. There, they were separated, and each experienced abuse and starvation that was worse than what they’d known on the raft. The prison guards were unusually cruel and sadistic, and men were often beaten unconscious. Louie spent a year at this camp before he was transferred to Omori.
At Omori, Louie met a man who made it his life’s mission to break Louie down. His name was Mitsuhiro Watanabe, but the prisoners called him “the Bird.” There were hundreds of POWs at Omori, but the Bird singled Louie out as the “number one prisoner.” The Bird was from a privileged background but hadn’t made officer in the Japanese military. His resentment made him loathe men of higher ranks and anyone who’d been successful in civilian life. As an officer and former Olympian, Louie was the perfect target.
Over the next year, at Omori and another camp named Naoetsu, the Bird beat Louie on a daily basis. He’d hunt Louie down in the sea of POWs and beat him with sticks, punch him until he was unconscious, and threaten to kill him. He used a heavy belt buckle to whip Louie in the side of the head, and Louie went deaf in one ear for a few weeks.
Under the oppressive hand of the Bird, Louie began to disintegrate emotionally and psychologically. He dreamt of the Bird attacking him in his sleep, dreams that often ended with Louie trying to strangle his abuser. Louie swore he would never let the Bird see him afraid, but the constant abuse was chipping away at his dignity. Starving to death, sick, and desperate, Louie often had to beg the very man who tormented him for help.
Louie was offered an out from his hell one day when radio producers from Tokyo wanted him to deliver a propaganda broadcast. Louie had been officially declared dead in the United States, and the Japanese wanted to use Louie to embarrass the American government. If he complied, he could live in a furnished room and eat large lavish meals. Louie refused. He wouldn’t become a pawn in the enemy’s game.
The abuse continued up until a few days before the war’s end. It was 1948, and both Germany and Japan had surrendered. The Americans brought supplies to the POW camps and eventually liberated them. Louie just made it. He’d developed a fatal vitamin deficiency that was on the verge of killing him days before they were saved. Louie and other POWs looked for the Bird, but he’d already escaped.
The nation was captivated by Louie’s story of survival. He became an instant celebrity and gave many speeches about his experiences. But inside, Louie suffered from crippling PTSD. He experienced night terrors, flashbacks, and aggressive behavior. Every night he dreamed that the Bird was abusing him, and every night he dreamed of strangling him.
When Louie first came home, he met and married a young woman named Cynthia Applewhite. He loved her from the moment he saw her and wanted to give her a good life. But with his running career over because of injuries sustained in the prison camp and no job prospects, he began to falter. Louie drank heavily to keep his demons away and became obsessed with a revenge plot to travel to Japan and murder the Bird.
For four years, Louie spun out of control. Even the birth of his daughter couldn’t stop his drinking or murderous thoughts. It wasn’t until he went to a Billy Graham sermon that he was able to find relief. At the sermon, he was reminded of the promise he made to God on the raft. Louie realized he hadn’t fulfilled his end of the deal. He quit drinking and smoking and started preaching the word of God, telling his story around the world, now through the lens of gratitude and faith.
Louie dedicated the rest of his life to helping others in need. He continued to speak at events, opened a therapeutic retreat for troubled teens, and volunteered with seniors. He traveled back to Japan and was able to find forgiveness for those who tormented him. But he never saw the Bird again.
After leaving the camp, the Bird went on the run from authorities for seven years. When the hunt for war criminals ended, he came out of hiding and became a successful businessman in Tokyo. In the late 1990s, Watanabe gave an interview, in which he waffled between remorse and self-righteousness. He maintained that he was just doing his job and was a victim of wartime hysteria. He was offered an opportunity to meet with Louie, both close to 80 years old, but he declined. He died in 2003.
For Louie, life moved on, and he never again lost his zeal for living. He started running again and continued to through his sixties. In his 70s, he took up skateboarding. In his 90s, he was still skiing and climbing trees. He received numerous awards and honors, and his childhood home was declared a historic monument. Louie carried the torch at five Olympic opening ceremonies, including the 1998 Winter Games in Japan. As he carried the torch past the location of his former prison camp in Naoetsu, Louie felt nothing but peace and love for life.
In June 1943, Louie Zamperini found himself lost at sea. He was on one of two inflatable rafts with two other American soldiers. They’d been stranded for 27 days and were dehydrated, malnourished, sun-beaten, and exhausted from the constant call to thwart the efforts of circling sharks. Although they didn’t know it, they’d drifted 1000 miles already across the vast sea and into Japanese territory.
Zamperini, 26 years old, was a world-class runner. Just months before, he’d been tapped to be the first person to run a mile in under four minutes. His body, once the grand specimen that competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, was now all but destroyed.
Suddenly, an aircraft flew above them. The three men scrambled to get the flight crew’s attention, hoping to be rescued. Instead, they found themselves under attack from a Japanese bomber.
The men dove overboard and used the raft as a shield. Bullets zoomed past, leaving contrails in the water. The onslaught stopped, and Louie and his mates climbed back into the rafts. But the plane returned a moment later and was heading straight for them. The other two men were too weak to swim again, but Louie went under. It was either the guns or the sharks, and he chose the sharks.
Long before Louis Silvie Zamperini was an Olympic athlete and soldier in WWII, he was a child criminal no one knew how to handle. Born to Italian immigrants in New York in January 1917, he was the second of what would become four children. His parents were Anthony, a coal miner and boxer, and Louise, who had Louie when she was 18. After Louie came down with pneumonia at the age of two, the family moved to Southern California to live in warmer weather.
The family moved to the town of Torrance just south of Los Angeles. In Torrance, Louie’s antics earned him the reputation of being the town terror. He once ran across a busy highway and was almost run over. At five, he started smoking cigarette butts found on the street. At family dinners, he climbed under the table and stole his parents’ glasses of wine. One night, he grew so inebriated, he fell into a rosebush in the yard. On another, he almost drowned in a refinery well after diving off the top of an oil rig. When they pulled him out, he was covered in oil.
Mostly, Louie was a thief. He learned how to pick locks with wire and broke into neighbors’ homes to steal their dinner off the tables. The sight of Louie sprinting down an alley carrying a whole cake was not infrequent. He stole a keg of beer from a local party and pies from the local bakery. He was always on the run, with enraged community members trailing behind, two of which threatened to shoot him if he came by again.
Louie also ran random money-making rackets. He jammed up pay phones and returned later to collect the lodged change. He stole copper from a scrap lot and returned to sell it back to the owner the next day. He staged fights with other kids so adults would pay them to stop. It seemed no behavior was off limits for Louie.
Although a terror, Louie was brazen, clever, capable, and fearless. These traits would serve him well as an adult in the war.
Louie was an outcast, not only for his mischievous ways, but also for his looks. He was scrawny and still struggled with his lungs because of the childhood pneumonia. He had big ears and unruly hair. Louie also spoke little English as a young boy because of the Italian spoken at home, and he stayed quiet through most of kindergarten and first grade. Thinking he was slow, the teachers held him back a grade.
Louie was often bullied, but he never reacted to anything that happened to him. Other boys would punch and kick him, and he’d be bruised and bloody. But he never ran away, cried, or complained. He’d simply cover his face and wait for the abuse to be over.
As he got older, Louie grew more broody and brutal. He started hanging out with a rough crowd, but although he acted tough, he was crippled by shyness inside. He asked his father to teach him how to box and started lifting weights. He was able to fight his offenders now, but his rage was growing and turning toward everyone. On separate occasions, he punched a girl, shoved a teacher, and threw tomatoes at police officers. He even broke one kid’s nose and beat another unconscious.
His parents didn’t know what to do with him. They were always required to make amends to the neighbors either through apologies or payment for damaged or stolen items. His father’s salary barely supported the family for the week, and the extra money was a burden. Anthony often punished Louie with spankings, but Louie never faltered. Like with the bullies, he took the beatings and continued his behavior.
Nothing anyone did worked. Louie was untameable and becoming more destructive. He was failing school and showed no skills other than mischief. If he continued to follow this path, there would be no real future for him.
A turning point for Louie would cause him to change his ways. American scientists had started touting eugenics in the 1930s. Eugenics was the idea of removing all undesirable people from the gene pool as a means to strengthen the race. The list for who would be sterilized was long and included the mentally ill, women deemed promiscuous, slow learners, criminals, the sick, the disabled, and the homeless.
At the beginning of the decade, California was deep into eugenics. They would sterilize close to twenty thousand people.
A teenage boy at Louie’s school was considered mentally incompetent and sent away to a mental institution. The boy’s parents had to legally fight to save him from sterilization. Louie knew that who he had become was exactly the kind of person slated for the same kind of trouble. This realization snapped him out of his behavior, and he started trying to change.
Louie started to engage more with others in a positive way. He helped around the house, made biscuits for his community, and gave away the things he’d stolen. Still, he was restless, and he’d lie awake at night dreaming of traveling far away from home.
No one could have foreseen how Louie’s life would change because of a silly school prank. After discovering that his house key unlocked the school gym, Louie started letting kids into basketball games for free. When the principal found out, he banned Louie from all athletic teams and social events. Louie didn’t care, but his brother Pete did.
Pete was Louie’s older brother by less than two years and was everything Louie was not. Pete was good-looking, well-liked, well-mannered, and charismatic. He had such a good head on his shoulders, his parents often turned to him for advice when he was just a child. He once saved someone from drowning.
Pete was a protective older brother to Louie and their sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, and Louie worshipped him. Pete was the only person Louie would listen to.
Pete went to the principal and advocated for his brother. He explained that Louie only acted out for attention. If Louie could be recognized for something good, it would change him, Pete was sure of it. He said allowing him to participate in a sport could be that good thing. The principal eventually gave in, and Louie became eligible for sports in 1932.
Pete was a star athlete, earning ten varsity letters throughout high school. Four of those were in track, in which he had set the school record for the mile at 5:06. Pete had seen the speed with which Louie ran from trouble and thought he might have some running chops, as well. From that moment on, Pete took on the responsibility of training Louie to be a runner.
Louie’s first effort was dismal. He was humiliated in a crushing defeat during a foot race and was unmotivated to continue. But Pete forced Louie to train and monitored his training like a professional coach. Louie did better in another event, coming in third. As he crossed the finish line, he was enthralled by the cheering crowd. The prospect of more of that kind of attention was enough to make him keep training.
Pete rode behind Louie on his bicycle, whacking him with a stick. He made Louie pick himself up when he was tired and keep running. The training was grueling, but both boys started to see results. Louie became the first student from Torrance to compete in the All City Finals, in which he got fifth. But the constraints of his training regimen only exacerbated Louie’s restlessness. He missed the freedom of being wild, so the summer after the All City Finals, he left home.
Louie’s adventure on the road was such a disaster, it would force him to take stock of his life. Louie and another friend jumped a train headed north and ended up trapped in a boxcar in the heat with no ventilation. Panicked, they escaped by climbing through a roof vent.
A railroad detective found the boys and forced them to jump off at gunpoint while the train was still moving. Days of loitering and thieving left them exiled from towns. They were destitute and stranded in a railyard. Louie saw a train with a fine-dining car go by, and something about the refinement of the people inside made him realize he was wasting his life. He started for home immediately and reconciled himself to let Pete train him.
All of the effort Louie had put into plotting and scheming now went into running. He no longer ran to escape trouble or an altercation. He ran because it was what started to feel the most natural.
With his world suddenly falling into a cathartic focus, Louie’s body and behavior worked to reach their potential. He quit boozing and smoking and worked on increasing his lung capacity by submerging himself in the local pool in Redondo Beach, sometimes for as long as three and a half minutes.
Louie also became interested in the career of a runner from the University of Kansas, Glenn Cunningham. Cunningham had survived a tragic accident and had to teach himself how to walk again, then run. He was quickly becoming a legend in the making for his prowess in the mile. Louie idolized him.
Pete joined the track team of a junior-college in Compton, but he didn’t release his self-imposed duty as Louie’s personal trainer. He came home on a regular basis and taught Louie about form and the psychology of running.
Pete also recognized a special physical component of Louie’s body. Louie’s hips were configured in a way that allowed them to roll as he ran, which meant his next step was already forming as the first step was landing. This trait gave him a massive stride, about seven feet long. This advantage was of most benefit in longer races. Pete wanted Louie to become a miler.
During his sophomore year in 1933, it was finally time to put all his hard work over the summer and fall to the test when track season started in early winter. In his first competition, Louie broke Pete’s school record for the 880-yard race by two seconds. A week later, he broke another of Pete’s records, this time clocking a mile time three seconds faster than his brother’s at 5:03. Over the season, he would whittle down his mile time to 4:42, setting a new state record.
Louie grew bored with racing against high school students. He decided to compete against Pete and thirteen runners from various colleges in a two-mile race, a distance he’d never competed in or trained for. Louie won the race easily, finishing 50 yards ahead of the pack. He also entered a two-mile cross country race at UCLA against a pack of collegiate runners from Southern California. He finished a quarter-mile ahead of the other racers and set a new course record at sixteen. With these finishes, Louie started to believe he was something special.
Louie’s stature as a legend was cemented his junior year at the Southern California Track and Field Championship. He set a national high school mile record that day at 4:21.3, two seconds faster than the previous record held since WWI. One report said it was unlikely his record would be broken within the next twenty years. The reporter was only off by one year.
Louie’s success made the community of Torrance change their feelings about him. Where once he was the town terror, now he was a local hero. His life became an embarrassment of riches. People lined up for autographs, and he received so many wristwatches as prizes, he started giving them away to neighbors. Girls swarmed him, and the press took photos of him and his trophies in front of his house.
Watching Louie train became a spectator sport at the track, and people started referring to him as “Iron Man” and the “Torrance Tornado.” Newspapers from all over Southern California were pumping out stories about this budding superstar, including the LA Times and Examiner.
For the boy whose only thought used to be what to steal next, Louie’s life now encompassed bigger dreams. He started to believe his legs could take him all the way to the world’s stage. He set his sights on the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
Louie’s Olympic dream required an adjustment in his training. There was no mile race, only the 1500, 100 meters shorter. Many of the Olympic runners would be older, around their mid-20s, including Louie’s hero, Glenn Cunningham, who would be twenty-seven by the 1936 games. In comparison, Louie would only be nineteen.
None of these factors deterred Louie, who’d already become the best high school miler ever in America. Over the two years that Louie had been competing, he’d shaved 42 seconds off his mile time. Louie was determined to make it to Berlin, and once he completed his undefeated senior season, the experts started to think he might just do it.
After graduating from high school in 1935, scholarship offers from a multitude of top schools came flooding in. Pete had transitioned to USC on a scholarship and was making his mark as one of the best milers in the country, as well. He urged Louie to accept their offer but defer until after the Olympic trials seven months away. Louie agreed and went to live with Pete so they could continue their training partnership.
Louie was a ferocious trainer, working with Pete every day to get in shape for the 1500. But his dream ended in the spring when he realized he wasn’t improving fast enough. Louie was too young, and there was no way to make his body mature to the level of his competition. He was crushed.
Louie’s confidence and brashness in the face of obstacles as a child would come to be his saving grace after losing his dream of racing in the 1500 in Berlin. Louie saw an article about an upcoming meet at the Los Angeles Coliseum. A twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher, Norman Bright, was touted as one of the favorites in the 5,000 meters race. Bright had the second-best time behind a younger racer from Indiana named Don Lash.
Louie learned that three 5,000-meter runners would go to the Olympics. Pete pushed him to enter the race, despite its extended distance of just over three miles. If Louie could keep up with Bright, he’d have a shot at making the team. With only two weeks until the meet and having never run farther than a mile twice in high school, Louie knew it was a long shot. But Louie was nothing if not a fighter. He trained so intensely, he lost the skin off one of his toes.
Louie would learn just what he was made of during that race. In front of 10,000 fans, Bright and Louie ran neck and neck the whole way. Although Bright finished a heartbeat ahead of Louie, both their times were faster than the previous record of that year.
With his Olympic dream suddenly a reality again, Louie strived for greatness at this new distance. He succeeded at his second qualifier in June 1936, clocking the third-fastest time in the country. Louie was invited to the Olympic trials in New York.
The residents of Torrance felt Louie’s Olympic dream like it was their own, and they helped procure everything he needed to travel to the big city. They even had “Torrance Tornado” put on his new suitcase.
New York was having a record-breaking summer, and temperatures were excruciating. Three thousand people died across the country as a result of a three-day heat wave. In Manhattan, where the temperature reached up to 106 degrees, forty people died.
These were the conditions of the Olympic trials. There was no way to avoid the heat while Louie and the other runners trained day in and out. Overheated, dehydrated, and unable to rest or eat, many of the racers dropped significant amounts of weight, ten pounds or more, even Louie.
Louie also struggled with the difference in his stature in New York. The papers focused on Lash as the favorite. Louie was intimidated but positive he would at least be in the top three. He spent a sleepless night before the race, praying he wouldn’t disappoint everyone from home.
The conditions on the day of the race were dangerous. The temperature was at least 100 degrees. Racers were passing out and being taken to the hospital. There was no shade, and by the time Louie’s race was called, he’d been sitting in the scorching sun for hours.
Louie let Lash take the early lead and hung back in the middle biding his time. Racers were dropping on the track from the heat, and Louie’s feet were burning through his shoes. On the final lap, Louie kicked up his pace. Lash was still out front, and Louie pulled closer and closer down the backstretch to within yards of Lash. When they approached the final turn, he threw everything he had at the track and pulled up side by side with Lash. Exhausted and overheated, Louie and Lash flung their bodies over the line. It was a photo finish.
At home in Torrance, Louie’s house was filled with neighbors listening to the race on the radio.
Family and friends celebrated with shouts of joy, people rushing in, cars honking in the streets. Louise cried tears of joy, and Anthony passed out wine for toasts. Even though the judges had given the win to Lash, the community was overjoyed—Louie was going to the Olympics.
Louie’s placement on the Olympic team was historic. He became the youngest runner to represent the United States at the Olympics in the nation’s history.
A Journey Like No Other
The journey for Louie and his fellow U.S. Olympians was anything but luxurious on the impressive steamer, the Manhattan. Although massive, there was no training space for the various athletes, and any spaces found were challenged by the constant rocking of the ship against the waves of the Atlantic.
The saving grace aboard ship were the elaborate meals served. There were pastries in the morning, steak and eggs for breakfast, coffee, tea, lunch in the afternoon, and great dinners in the evenings.
Many of the other athletes were from communities afflicted by the Depression, and they gorged happily. But there were consequences. By the time the ship reached Germany, many had gained weight, including a javelin thrower who gained eight pounds over the journey. Others no longer qualified in their events because of specific weight classes, and a few were too out of shape to compete.
The Manhattan docked in Germany on July 24, and the athletes walked off into a country on the dawn of one of the worst tragedies in history. Of course, at the time, no one could have known what was waiting on the other side of the Olympics.
Despite his confidence, Louie knew he was no real match for the strong competition in his event. The 5,000-meter race had been dominated by the Finns in the last four Olympics. Louie was young, unseasoned, out of practice, and overweight. He barely made fifth in his heat, just barely squeaking through to the final. He would need to improve his condition during the three days until the main event.
On the day of the race, Louie gathered at the starting line filled with fear. There were one hundred thousand people in attendance. His nervous energy almost caused him to start out too strong, but he pulled back, like he had at the trials, and paced himself with the middle of the pack. Lash and the Finns separated themselves as the early leaders.
Louie’s race did not go as planned. He became nauseous during the race because of a strong stench coming from one of the racer’s hair in front of him. To get away from it, he slowed and slipped back, but he couldn’t find his juice, not even when he felt it was time to start moving up. He slid into twelfth place.
As the race neared the end, Louie remembered something Pete had told him: “A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain.” Louie started to accelerate, digging deep into the track and himself. He took over many of the runners ahead of him and pushed himself over the line. He finished seventh but had run the race of his life.
Despite missing the podium, Louie’s race was considered an astonishment by everyone in attendance. He’d devoured 50 lost yards in the final 400 meters and shaved eight seconds off his previous personal best. He’d run the fastest 5,000 of any American that year and was 12 seconds faster than the best time set by Lash the year before.
Another astonishing aspect of Louie’s race was that his final lap was the fastest final lap in a distance race in the history of the Olympics. It was rare for someone to run a final lap in any distance race in less than a minute. Even in the mile, the three fastest recorded final laps were 61.2, 59.1, and 58.9 seconds. Louie’s final lap was 56 seconds.
Once Louie was cleaned up and in the stands, one of Hitler’s ministers informed Louie that Hitler wanted to meet him. From his seat, perched high above the stands, Hitler reached down to shake Louie’s hand and said, “Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.”
When Louie and the other athletes were brought through Berlin to the opening ceremonies, they saw for the first time the influence of the Nazis. Flags and banners were everywhere. Men and children lined up in uniform. Military units conducted drills in the streets.
There was a conspicuous absence of Jews and Gypsies, and all over the city, Jewish businesses sat destroyed. The Berlin games were crafted around German superiority, with Adolf Hitler at the helm. National anthems for all other countries were truncated. And whenever Hitler entered the stadium, he was greeted with uproarious applause and Nazi salutes.
A few days after Louie and his trackmates left the village on August 11, the Olympics ended and Hitler reaped the accolades. The end of the Olympics was the beginning of the Nazi’s master plan. Within days of the closing ceremonies, Berlin was covered in anti-semitic propaganda and “No Jews Allowed” posters on public establishments. Soon, the Olympic village was turned into military barracks. In a small town 20 miles away, the first group of Jews were being delivered to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Before anyone overseas got wind of Hitler’s plan, Louie arrived back home. Four thousand people threw him a welcome home party in Torrance, and he was seated on a throne in the back of a truck and paraded through town. A marching band played, first-responder vehicles turned on their sirens, and factories blew their whistles.
Louie took all the attention in stride, but inside, he was disappointed in how slowly he’d run. Louie wasn’t home long before he and Pete were back to scheming. They believed he could win gold in the 1500 at the next Olympics. Louie set his sights on the 1940 summer games in Tokyo.
Back from the Olympics, Louie began his career as a member of an elite track team at USC. One of his best friends was a sprinter named Payton Jordan, who also had his sights set on the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Louie also befriended a Japanese student, Kunichi James “Jimmie” Sasaki, who hung around some of the track guys. Sasaki was older, quiet, observant, and amicable. He said he had degrees from several Ivy League schools.
Jimmie and Louie shared similar tastes for music and athletics and became close. They also shared a common interest in the town of Torrance. Jimmie said he visited Torrance often to lecture about Japanese heritage to the local Japanese residents. Louie thought it was weird, knowing there weren’t a lot of Japanese in Torrance, but he admired Jimmie’s efforts.
It would be years before Jimmie was outed as a fraud. He’d never attended any of the Ivy League schools he claimed to have graduated from, and he was actually closer to forty than thirty, the age he’d told Louie he was. Jimmie had a wife and children and wasn’t even a student at USC. He’d graduated a decade earlier with a degree in political science. Although Louie couldn’t have known it at the time, he’d encounter Jimmie later in life, under very different circumstances.
Louie pushed himself and trained like a champion at USC. He continued to dominate his events and set new records. Two years later, in Spring 1938, Louie was running the mile at 4:13.7, not far off the world record of 4:06.4.
Coaches, runners, and experts were noticing the trend and all expected Louie to break the world record. Even his idol, Glenn Cunningham, told reporters that Louie was the next mile champion. Many started to wonder whether it was possible to run a four-minute mile. Most said it wasn’t. Pete, on the other hand, believed that Louie could be the first to do it, and though Louie doubted Pete at first, that spring, he started to believe.
By summer, Louie was in the best shape of his life, and his body was becoming crafted in a way that propelled him past the pace and exertion he’d previously enjoyed. Louie was slated to run the mile at the NCAA Championships in 1938, where he anticipated breaking the four-minute barrier. A coach from Notre Dame heard other coaches instructing their runners to sharpen their spikes and impale Louie during the race. He shared this information with Louie, but Louie paid the warning no mind.
On race day, Louie found himself surrounded by a group of runners after two laps. They boxed him in, and one runner intentionally stomped on Louie’s foot, sending his spike straight into his toe. Another kicked back with his feet in a way that slashed Louie’s shins with his spikes. Another runner cracked Louie’s rib with the butt of his elbow. They kept him trapped for a lap and a half, but when they came to the final turn, Louie saw a hole in the men and surged through it. Bleeding, broken, and with a destroyed shoe, he blew past the leader and easily won.
Louie was resentful about the actions of the other runners and assumed they’d caused him to clock a slow time, around 4:20. Then, Louie heard a gasp in the audience as the times went up on the race board. He’d run a 4:08.3 mile, a new NCAA record and the fifth-fastest time in history. He was 1.9 seconds off the world record. His NCAA record lasted for fifteen years.
As the season wound down, Louie learned that Japan had withdrawn as host for the 1940 games, and they would now be held in Helsinki, Finland. He went undefeated during the 1939 season and performed well against the best runners in the country at indoor meets in the early part of 1940. Louie continued to improve, almost setting a new indoor mile world record twice. He was peaking, and the timing couldn’t have been better.
Across the globe, Japan and Germany had started their war campaigns. Japan had invaded China in 1937, and Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Then, in spring 1940, the Nazis stormed Europe, with the help of the Soviet Union, and started WWII. The bombing destroyed large swaths of Finland, including Helsinki. The Olympic stadium suffered extensive damage, and one of Louie’s Finnish competitors in Berlin died during the attack. The Olympics were canceled.
After this news, Louie began to unravel. He became susceptible to illness and physically diminished. He lost his power and started losing races. His senior season at USC ended with a thump, and he left, failing to graduate by a few credits, and took a job as a welder in a factory.
The war in Europe was raging the summer of 1940, with Germany and the Soviets gaining ground all the way to Great Britain. Concurrently, Japan was gaining more control over Asia. America responded by banning all trade with Japan, but that didn’t stop the Japanese forces. In fall 1940, the U.S. government started crafting a draft bill.
Young American men were told that if they voluntarily enlisted before the bill was enforced, they could choose which branch of the military they served in. Louie had become mesmerized by the planes he saw being made for American and British Air Forces at his factory. He decided to enlist in the Army Air Corps in early 1941. But Louie suffered from air sickness and wanted to correct his mistake. Desperate to be let out of service, he signed release papers without even reading them.
After leaving the air corps, Louie went to Hollywood to work as an extra. He was hired to work on They Died with Their Boots On, a movie starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Shortly after the film started shooting, Louie got his draft letter in the mail.
As part of the release agreement he’d signed, Louie had unwittingly agreed to rejoin the Air Corps if brought back into service. He was slated to become a bombardier and went to Houston for training in November. His life and those of every American would change forever less than a month later.
Around the time that Louie started his training in Houston, the U.S. government, aided by the FBI, received word that Jimmie Sasaki was working as a spy for Japanese intelligence. His trips to Torrance had actually been visits to a large transmitter used to send information to the Japanese. Whether Jimmie was involved in the events that unfolded one morning in December is unclear, but it didn’t matter. The damage would be done regardless.
Before dawn on December 7, 1941, a Japanese pilot named Mitsuo Fuchida flew a small aircraft over Oahu scoping the strength of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. He spotted eight battleships off the coast and signaled to his comrades. Within minutes, 180 Japanese bombers came up behind him and began the assault on Oahu. This was the first wave of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Within the span of two hours, Japanese bombers attacked the base in Oahu, along with other bases in Thailand, China, the Philippines, Guam, Midway, and Wake. In total, more than 2,400 people would be killed during the Japanese attacks.
The attack on Wake was the most surprising. The atoll was far out in the Pacific ocean and manned by 500 American soldiers. They were successful in holding the Japanese takeover off for almost two weeks, finally succumbing on Christmas Eve. At the time of seizure, Japan had lost 1,153 men compared to only 52 American deaths. Others were captured and became some of the first Pacific POWs, as those held under Japanese rule would become known. Ninety-eight American servicemen were detained on Wake, but no one knew they were there.
The American government assumed invasion was imminent. Civilians prepared for the worst. There were air raids along the west coast, and trenches were dug and schools closed up and down California. Across the nation, law enforcement and the National Guard took up stations to protect bridges, waterways, and factories.
Louie was in Texas enjoying a weekend pass. He was watching a movie with other servicemen when an announcement blasted through the theater telling the men about the attack and to return to their bases. Louie would always remember sitting in shock at the news that America, including himself, was now at war.
After America officially entered the war, Louie graduated from his training as a bombardier and became a second lieutenant. Pete had also joined the war effort and was a Navy chief petty officer in San Diego. Both Zamperini boys went to their family home in Torrance to say goodbye. On August 19, Louie’s entire family posed for a photograph on their front steps before he departed.
The day Louie arrived at an airbase in Washington state, he met another second lieutenant named Russell Allen “Phil” Phillips, who would be the pilot of Louie’s plane. Phil was 26 years old, from Indiana, and engaged to be married to his college sweetheart, Cecy. He was quiet and had an ability to cope with stress and adversity amicably and calmly.
Louie and Phil grew close on the base. Louie’s gregariousness was the perfect complement to Phil’s demureness and vice versa. They were introduced to the rest of their plane crew—the eighth of nine crews within the 372nd Bomb Squadron of the 307th Bomb Group, Seventh Airforce. They were given a new type of bomber, the B-24 Liberator, unaffectionately known as the “Flying Coffin.”
The B-24 was one of the heaviest planes ever made and was difficult to control because of a lack of steering in the wheelbase. It was a massive, clumsy plane known for many mechanical failures. Many of the model’s initial rides had ended by simply falling from the sky.
Louie’s crew trained for months in their B-24, with Louie stationed in a small glass enclosure in the plane’s nose. The crew trained tirelessly and became known as one of the best crews in the squadron, with Phil earning distinction. They completed hundreds of hours of training without incident, which was significant considering that during their first three months of training, B-24 accidents had killed an average of nine men per day. Because of this, Louie and his crew, as well as all the others, were extensively trained in crash procedures.
Eventually, Louie’s crew named their plane Super Man, which was painted on the side with a cartoon of the superhero holding a bomb and gun. On a mid-October afternoon in 1942, the crew of Super Man were told to pack their bags. They were finally heading off to fight.
Eleven months earlier, the Japanese had started America’s war. Now, Louie was headed into it over the Pacific Ocean. The ocean would be the stage for the next years of his life.
Louie and his crew were sent to Kahuku, a base on the beach of the north shore of Oahu. They were eager to put their training to work, but what they found instead were endless days of waiting.
Dull moments on base were spent patrolling the surrounding waters for signs of the enemy. The men also passed the time pulling practical jokes on each other. Once, Louie replaced his chewing gum with laxative gum to teach Phil and copilot Charleton Hugh Cuppernell a lesson after they repeatedly stole his. When he wasn’t horsing around, Louie ran laps around the runways to stay in peak shape.
Months passed, and Louie’s crew had yet to see battle. Each time a plane came back to the base, they’d inspect it, marveling at bullet holes in the sides. Then, on December 22, 1942, Louie and his crew were told to pack supplies for a three-day excursion and report to Super Man. They were heading to Midway, a Pacific island closer to the Wake Atoll, to attack the Japanese’s stronghold built on the remains of Wake.
The mission involved dive-bombing the island and would last approximately sixteen hours, the longest air battle engaged thus far during the war. B-24s were not typically meant to fly that long, but the addition of auxiliary fuel tanks would help push them just to point of completion. Super Man and other B-24s were gutted of every non-essential part to lighten their loads.
In the late afternoon of Christmas Eve, twenty-six B-24s took off from Midway, with Super Man pulling up the rear. Seven hours later, the Wake Atoll came into view. An hour later, at midnight, the planes dropped their bombs on the sleeping base below, and the island exploded in fire. Streaks of light entered the sky when the Japanese fired back. What none of the American bombers knew was that the 98 American captives were still imprisoned on the island.
As Super Man dove toward the atoll, Louie readied his bombs. On one of them, he’d written an inscription honoring his college friend Payton Jordan’s recent nuptials. Louie dropped six bombs onto the airstrip below, hitting his targets, then Phil turned Super Man around and headed back to Midway. But the bomb bay doors were stuck open, causing a massive lag in momentum and burning excess fuel. There was nothing to do but hope they had enough fuel to make it back.
Phil finally located the small airway strip of Midway through a blanket of fog. At that precise moment, one of the engines died on Super Man. He was able to touch down right as a second engine died. The other two died as he pulled into the bunker. A few extra miles would have meant a crash landing in the Pacific for Louie and his crew.
The attack on Wake was a success. All American planes returned, and the damage to the atoll was significant. America had proven what their B-24s were capable of, and none of the prisoners had been harmed. Phil and the other pilots received Distinguished Flying Crosses, and the rest of the crew received Air Medals. America was pumped up after the attack and assumed the Japanese would surrender soon. However, things were only getting started.
In early spring 1943, Louie’s crew was slated for another attack. This time, they’d be bombing a tiny island called Nauru, which sat 2,500 miles away from Hawaii. The island was home to immense stores of phosphate, which was an essential ingredient in munition creation. The Japanese had seized the island the previous summer, and Louie’s crew was meant to destroy the phosphate plants. The Super Man would first fly to the island of Funafuti, from where they would set off.
On an April dawn, Super Man and twenty-two other planes left Funafuti for Nauru. The travel time was six and a half hours, and all men on Louie’s plane were silent throughout the ride. Super Man was in front, flanked by a bomber on each side. At first, the island seemed motionless, and Phil turned over control to the bombsight. Louie located his targets, but fire flared up in the sky around them. The two planes flanking Super Man were shot down, leaving Louie’s plane exposed.
Super Man took a hit, and a chunk of the plane’s right rudder flew off. Louie was finally able to reclaim control and dropped his bombs on three different targets. His final drop was over a fuel depot, and the explosion destroyed the supply.
Phil turned Super Man around to head back, but Japanese aircraft surrounded them. Louie saw nine enemy planes from his location under the nose. Some of the planes passed by so close that Louie could see the faces of Japanese soldiers inside. The Super Man took enemy fire from every direction. Phil and Cuppernell pushed the plane back toward Funafuti, fighting the damaged plane and dodging enemy attacks the whole way.
Holes opened up on all sides of Super Man, sending shards of light streaking into the cabin. As the Japanese fighters continued to fire on Super Man, more holes opened up, and some of the hits were so significant, they sent shrapnel into the gunners’ bodies. Louie heard signs of distress from his crewmen. He left his station and climbed into the back of the plane. The first thing he saw was one of his men dangling outside the open bomb bay. Louie pulled him in and settled him in a corner. The man’s uniform was riddled with bullets.
Louie then saw something equally upsetting. The hydraulic lines were severed, which meant Phil would have no access to landing gear or brakes. Louie saw three more men slumped on the ground bleeding, and he and Cuppernell administered first aid to the wounded men.
During all of this, Super Man was being chased by two enemy planes. Louie felt something dripping on him from above and looked up to see Stanley Pillsbury, the top turret gunner, in his perch, his leg so badly wounded it was dangling below him. Louie tried to help Pillsbury, but the man didn’t notice his injuries. He was engaged in the fight for his life with the enemy planes.
Pillsbury saw a Japanese fighter rearing up in front of him. If it fired on Super Man, the plane would crash into the Pacific Ocean. Once Pillsbury could see the face of the pilot, he held his breath, took aim, and fired. The shot hit home, sending the enemy plane spinning away and saving the men of Super Man.
With the threat of enemy fire thwarted, all hope now turned to trying to make it back to base. Louie continued to triage his crewmen in the back, and Phil continued to fight to keep Super Man stable and airborne. The latter task was much more difficult. The plane pushed against the controls, trying to turn its nose up, causing the plane to flip upside down. Phil pushed as hard as he could on the throttle and played with the engines to shift power from one side to the other to keep the plane centered.
As they kept course toward Funafuti, the men’s injuries worsened. Louie was able to gain control over Pillsbury’s wounds, but the first man, who’d been hanging out of the plane, was fading quickly. All men aboard knew the man was dying, and they also knew their own deaths were likely when they crash-landed on the runway without landing gear or breaks. They stayed silent, never speaking their fears aloud.
The runway finally came into view, but there was nothing Phil could do to stop the speed with which they approached. One of the men opened the bomb bay doors to slow the momentum. The other men, including the injured, worked hand pumps to release the landing gear. Louie wrapped each of them in parachute ropes affixed to parts of the plane. Still, the plane was coming in too hot.
When Super Man touched down on the Funafuti runway, Phil was able to make the landing so steady, no one in the back was disrupted. But the left tire of the landing gear was flat, which caused the plane to lurch at 110 miles per hour and careen toward two other planes. Cuppernell pounded the brake pedal despite the cut lines, finding just enough juice to engage the brakes. The plane spun then stopped before colliding with the other bombers.
After landing, a ground crewman counted the holes in the plane. Super Man had been hit 594 times, more than any other bomber on the mission. Louie couldn’t help looking at the beat up plane, with one hole so big his head almost fit through it. He knew the plane had saved him and all but one of his men. The man from the bomb bay door, named Harold Brooks, had died shortly after their arrival. He was twenty-two years old.
The various crews were exhausted after the Nauru attack, but there would be no rest for the weary. As the men relaxed, ground crews doctored the planes, getting them ready for another mission the next day. Super Man was too badly damaged to make the trip. Louie and Phil were in their tent, like all the others, asleep for the night. Louie awoke to a disturbing sound. A plane was flying back and forth above the island. Louie assumed it was lost and wished them well.
The next sound Louie heard was the roar of multiple engines and a loud explosion. Louie and Phil ran down the beach in search of shelter. They found a hut on stilts and dove underneath it. At least twenty men were already hiding there. In the infirmary, Pillsbury was stranded in bed, unable to escape with his bad leg. The small island was rocking from blast after blast, bombs dropping one after the other down the line of tents and base buildings. Louie and Phil’s tent disintegrated shortly after their escape.
When the bombing stopped, some men scurried out of hiding to help the wounded. On seeing Pillsbury stuck in bed, one soldier placed him on a stretcher and pulled him into a cement shelter. Louie and Phil stayed with the others under the hut. They knew the Japanese weren’t finished. They huddled together, terrified.
The enemy bombers came back three more times, targeting the gassed-up B-24s waiting on the runway. As the B-24s exploded, pieces flew through the air and bullets whizzed from the arsenals on board. The American bombs aboard, 500 pounds each, detonated. Then, the explosions stopped. The attack was over.
As morning light crept in, the men saw the wreckage of the island. Buildings had crumbled, planes were charred skeletons, if intact at all, and craters existed where tents had once been. Louie wrote in his diary of one crater that was 35 feet deep and 60 feet wide. Casualties were scattered all over, as were injured men. Others were too traumatized to speak.
Louie, Phil, Cuppernell, and two others from their crew were sent back to Hawaii. Pillsbury and the other wounded were sent to Samoa, where a doctor amputated his leg. One of the other men was too badly injured to fight and was sent home. Super Man and its crew were finished.
Louie was in a state of distemper back on the base in Hawaii. With no plane and no missions, Louie drank heavily, listened to music, and ran, trying to turn his mind from Brooke’s dying face to the 1944 Olympics.
A month later, Louie and the remaining Super Man crew were transferred to the eastern side of Oahu and paired with six new men. Everyone was apprehensive, for new crewmembers usually meant mistakes. There was one man named Francis “Mac” McNamara, who had a significant sweet tooth. Other than that, Louie found nothing notable about the others.
The new crew was given the infamous B-24 bomber known as the Green Hornet, a haggard plane with a treacherous history. The Green Hornet was known as a “musher,” meaning the tail tended to drag lower than the nose. It was a heavy plane previously only used for errands and had been pilfered of parts for other planes. Louie once rode in the Green Hornet for a brief moment and decided he never wanted to again.
On May 26, a nine-man crew took off in another B-24, piloted by Clarence Corpening. The next morning, Louie woke early to run. He asked a sergeant to pace him in a jeep and discovered he’d run a mile in 4:12 in the sand. He was in prime performance condition. After returning to his barracks, Louie learned that Corpening’s plane never reached its destination.
Phil and Louie were told to take the Green Hornet on a rescue mission to find Corpening’s plane. Another pilot, Joe Deasy, would join them in the Daisy Mae. Louie left a note telling his fellow servicemen to drink his liquor if he didn’t come back, then headed out. The Green Hornet’s crew was ready to fly.
Louie and his crew were given instructions to search a 200-mile circumference around the island of Palmyra, where Corpening’s plane was believed to have gone down. Louie and Phil were concerned about the Green Hornet. Phil was wary of flying a plane he’d never flown before, Louie was worried about its immense weight. There was also the issue of missing parts, and both hoped that nothing important had been removed.
Louie also checked to make sure survival provisions were on the plane. There was a supply box and two rafts onboard, as well as safety vests for the 11-man crew. Louie put his vest on as soon as he was on the plane.
The Green Hornet and Daisy Mae took off side by side, but because of the Green Hornet’s propensity for mushing, Louie’s plan fell behind. Phil told the Daisy Mae crew to go ahead and soon lost sight of the companion plane.
During the search, Cuppernell asked to switch places with Phil, a common request during non-combat flights so copilots could gain experience. Shortly after Cuppernell took over, a crewman noticed one engine burning more fuel than those on the opposite side of the plane. Then, the engine stopped, and the uneven distribution of power caused the Green Hornet to dip to one side and sink.
Feathering is a technique in which the side of the plane with the dead engine is turned toward the wind to cease propeller rotation. Feathering was the co-pilot’s job, but since Cuppernell was in the pilot seat and Phil was busy trying to keep the plane afloat, a new engineer was brought forward for the task.
On the control panel, each engine has a “feathering” button. The new engineer rushed into the cockpit, flipped open the plastic cover, and slammed down on one button. Unfortunately, he killed the working engine on the same side as the dead one. With maximum power on one side and no power on the other, the plane began to roll through the air. Phil tried to get the good engine started again, but there was no time. He told the crew, “Prepare to crash.”
Louie jumped into action and commanded everyone to get into crash positions, then pulled out the life rafts. Mac clutched the supply box. In the cockpit, Phil watched the ocean rising faster and faster toward them. As Louie watched the twirling sky out the window, his final thought before impact was that none of them would survive.
The only sensation Louie felt was the downward pull of the ocean. The plane had burst apart on impact, and as pieces sank, Louie sank with them. Louie tried to swim free, but he was stuck beneath a gun mount with cables wound around his body.
With a bleeding head wound, Phil struggled to escape the sinking cockpit. He found an open window and, using his feet and all his strength, shoved himself free. When he reached the surface, he saw pieces of the wreckage and two empty lifeboats in the distance. There was no one else above water. He held onto a piece of the plane and waited.
Far below the surface, Louie continued to struggle against the wires that gripped him. The water pressure caused his ears to pop, and he felt a painful surge through his head and passed out. When Louie regained consciousness, he was surrounded by blackness, but the wires trapping him were gone.
Louie’s chest burned as he took in ocean water mixed with oil, gas, and blood. He figured out his bearings inside the sinking capsule, forced his way out, and pulled the engagement string on his life vest. The vest ballooned and pulled him upward. When he reached the surface, Louie swallowed fresh air greedily. He was alive.
The ocean surrounding Louie was littered with hunks of the Green Hornet. Somewhere nearby, he heard a whisper and turned to see Phil and Mac, without the supply box, clinging to part of the plane. A little ways away sat the lifeboats. Louie reached one raft, then paddled hard with the oar to reach the other. Louie bandaged up Phil’s head, then slid him into one raft. The last thing Phil did before he passed out was turn over command to Louie.
Louie turned his attention to their survival. He took an inventory of supplies on the rafts and found a handful of army-grade chocolate, specially designed to be bitter to curb the desire to consume large quantities. There were also tins of water, a flare gun, sea dye, fishing hooks, wire, two air pumps, patch kits, and a multipurpose tool.
The following year, all B-24 rafts would be upgraded with various life-saving supplies, such as camouflage sun tarps, a mast and sail, sunscreen, first-aid kits, a knife, scissors, compass, a radio transmitter, and other essentials. But in 1943, none of these items was among the B-24 supplies.
Louie looked at their meager rations and knew their lives would be in jeopardy if they weren’t smart. They were near the equator, and dehydration would set in quickly. He devised a plan in which each man would get two squares of chocolate and three sips of water a day. This plan was meant to keep them alive for several days, at which time, they should be rescued.
Mac was a zombie. He hadn’t said a word since getting into the raft, just completing Louie’s commands with a distant look in his eyes. With the provisions figured out, Louie had time to register pain throughout his body. What he didn’t know was that he’d broken all of his ribs on impact. He pushed the pain away, as he did thoughts of the other members of his crew.
Louie couldn’t help but think about the mysterious way he became free of the wires under the surface. But all thoughts were put on hold by the arrival of sharks. Louie saw several sharks, some as long as twelve feet, circling the rafts, testing their strength by dragging their fins along the bottom fabric. For now, the sharks seemed content to circle without striking.
As night settled, the temperature plummeted. The men were chilled to the bone, so they bailed water into the boats to be heated by their bodies. The only sound on the open water was that of teeth chattering. Phil was still unconscious, and Louie soon drifted to sleep. Only Mac was awake, stricken by fear.
On the island of Palmyra, the Daisy Mae landed as the afternoon sun waned. Their search for Corpening’s plane had been unsuccessful. By early morning, the Green Hornet was also declared missing. Between the two planes, twenty-one men were unaccounted for.
Daisy Mae pilot Joe Deasy estimated that the Green Hornet had likely gone down in a swath of ocean eight hundred miles long. However, because the currents in that part of the ocean converged from the east and west, it was difficult to predict which way the survivors would drift. Air Force planes, along with two Navy air crafts, commenced their search for Louie and his crew.
The next morning, Louie awoke to find Phil still weak in his raft and Mac still silent. When Louie opened the compartment to retrieve the provisions, the chocolate was gone. Louie was confused until he saw the guilty look on Mac’s face. Louie was livid, but he hid his anger, telling the sergeant he was disappointed in him but understood he had acted out of fear. Their situation was more dire now without food, but Louie was sure they’d be found soon.
A little while later, the sound of a plane overhead reached the raft. Louie shot a flare and dumped the dye into the water, but the plane continued without seeing either sign. Louie was defeated for more than one reason. Not only had the plane not seen them, but its trajectory told him where their lifeboats were in relation to Palmyra. They were floating west into enemy territory, and search planes would not search in enemy territory. If they weren’t found soon, their chances of rescue would diminish greatly.
Another day passed without rescue, then the sound of another plane was heard. Again, the plane flew away without seeing Louie’s distress signals. Louie didn’t know that the plane was the Daisy Mae, and the crew hadn’t seen the rafts because of thick, low-hanging clouds.
The only hope Louie had was to hit land, which wouldn’t happen for some two thousand miles in the direction they were drifting. Even if they made it that far, they would land near the Marshall or Gilbert Islands, both of which were occupied by Japan.
Five days at sea without food and little water was beginning to take its toll. No other planes had appeared, and Mac finally cracked. He wailed around like a trapped animal, screaming that they were all going to die. Louie slapped him and Mac stopped shouting, but he returned to his catatonic state. Louie prayed silently for the second time in his life.
The lost men’s proximity to the equator created dangerous conditions during the scorching afternoons. Their bodies burned in the hot sun, their lips ballooned, and their skin cracked. They couldn’t get relief in the water because of the circling sharks, and there was nothing to drink.
Three days after the last of their water was consumed, a storm appeared on the horizon. Soon, the sun was shielded by clouds and rain poured down, providing a little relief. Louie made a funnel with the air pump canvas and filtered water into their tins. Once the rain stopped, the canvas proved to work as a hat. They made two hats and took turns wearing them once the sun reemerged.
With the days at sea stretching on with no end in sight, Mac’s selfish consumption of the chocolate grew in significance. Louie found it hard to hide his resentment, but he could see that Mac was stricken with guilt, so he let it slide. However, over the next weeks, starvation settled in, and the men were unable to turn their minds from food.
They survived by catching birds, eating the raw flesh, and using the rest as bait to catch fish. They never caught more than one or two tiny fish, but the meager ration was enough to give them energy and lift Louie’s and Phil’s spirits. Mac’s spirits could not be lifted.
The time between birds and fish was often long, leaving the men toiling for days. Intermittent rainstorms helped replenish their water supplies, but they always ran out before they could collect more. Days and weeks passed with no sounds other than the small ripples in the ocean.
Louie and Phil knew it was not uncommon for men lost at sea to go insane, and they decided they had to do something to keep their minds strong. They quizzed each other and told intricate stories about their pasts. Sometimes Phil sang church hymns, and Louie returned the favor by singing Christmas Carols.
Sometimes, they’d describe meals they’d enjoyed, detailing the ingredients, preparations, and flavors. Something about the detailed descriptions brought the food to life, especially when Louie described his mother’s cooking, and the brain was somehow tricked into satiation.
Talks also turned to the future, and Phil and Louie shared their plans for what they would do once they got back home. Talking about life after rescue filled Louie and Phil with hope, but Mac still lingered in darkness. He rarely shared stories and only spoke a few times, usually to ask Louie to describe his mother’s dishes.
Louie’s unruly determination as the terror of Torrance served him well on the raft. As he had in the face of bullies, he turned his insolence about their current circumstances into a resolution to remain undefeated.
The morning of the twenty-seventh day brought a sign of hope. The men became aware of rumbling in the sky and saw a plane flying overhead. Again, Louie fired two flares and sprinkled sea dye around their boat. Something marvelous happened. The plane made a loop and headed back in their direction. The men took off their shirts and waved them like flags above their heads.
Their joy only lasted a second. Within moments, a spray of bullets surrounded their rafts. The men lunged over the sides of the rafts and gathered underneath one. Bullets whizzed through the floor of the boats, streaking past their submerged bodies. When the firing stopped, the sharks came back, and it took every ounce of strength the emaciated men had to pull themselves back into the rafts, which were now slowly deflating from the bullet holes.
When the plane returned for a second pass, Louie saw the giant red circle of the Japanese flag painted on the side. The enemy bomber would make six passes in total. After the first attack, Phil and Mac were spent beyond movement and could do nothing but lay in the rafts and hope for the best while Louie jumped back into the water.
Underneath the raft, Louie pushed himself down beyond the point when the bullets lost their power, but this tactic brought other trouble. Through the dark water, Louie saw the mouth of a shark closing in. Louie made a threatening face and rammed his palm into the shark’s nose.
When the assault was finally over, Louie climbed into the raft to survey what was left of his companions. Miraculously, despite the myriad of bullets shot at them, Phil and Mac had survived without a single wound. The bullets had cut Phil’s raft in half, and the other raft was severely damaged. All three men now had to squeeze into one raft a little larger than a clawfoot bathtub.
The men’s troubles were far from over. The remaining raft was losing air quickly, causing part of it to submerge in the shark-infested waters. Something about the sinking raft gave the sharks more motivation. Where once they had merely surrounded the rafts, they now lunged above water trying to grab the men. Each man took turns knocking the sharks back with oars, but the movement caused the raft to deflate faster.
The process of fixing the boat was threefold. While Louie patched the holes, Mac and Phil took turns either pumping air or beating back sharks. They worked through the night until they had patched enough holes and pumped enough air for the raft to float again and the sharks to stop attacking. If one of the men had been lost during the crash or attack, they would not have had the manpower to recover.
Two good things came from the attack. The men were able to use the damaged raft as a sun shelter and blanket, and they had a better idea of where they were. Because the plane was Japanese, Phil reasoned they had drifted about halfway to the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. If they kept going at this pace, they’d likely see land after three more weeks.
Louie became resentful of the circling sharks. A few more had tried to attack them, and Louie decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. Louie caught two small sharks and split the livers in three. For the first time since the morning they took off in the Green Hornet, the men were full.
The nourishment worked for a while, but days later, Mac began to deteriorate dramatically. Louie and Phil did what they could to keep him alive, but one night, Mac asked if Louie thought he was going to die. Louie wanted to give Mac a chance to say any final words and said he thought it likely and soon. But Mac didn’t say anything else. Before the morning of Day 33 would come, Mac would release his last breath.
Although Mac had originally put the men in a perilous state, his help on the rafts had been immeasurable. Louie and Phil held an impromptu service over Mac’s body before sliding him into the water. The next day, without realizing it, Louie and Phil surpassed the record for survival at sea.
With only two of them, there was more room and more rations to go around when they had some. But even with the extra water and bits of food, Louie and Phil continued to suffer. They were skin and bones, covered in sores, and dying from starvation.
Then, one morning, everything changed. Upon waking, Louie and Phil felt the stillness of the raft, as though stationary on land, and looked around to see a world bathed in placid blue from top to bottom. They had drifted into the doldrums, the colloquial sailor term for the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a swath of ocean near the equator where winds from the north and south converge, creating an intense stillness.
The silence and reflection of the sky on the mirror-like surface of the water transcended reality and brought a sense of peace to both men. Louie felt they had been provided a mystical gift in the midst of what had seemed like certain death. It was an auspicious moment, and the two soaked in the essence of that timeless space until sunset.
Days passed without any sustenance for the men, and the raft was becoming as ravaged as their bodies. Phil began to see swarms of birds in the distance, but as the sounds crossed the open water, he realized they were planes. There was no doubt the planes belonged to the Japanese, but they were too far away to be of concern.
Then, on July 13, forty-six days into their journey, a great storm swooped in and created massive waves. The waves lifted the raft high into the air, allowing the men to glimpse a landmass far off in the horizon. As the waves moved them forward, the men discussed strategies for how to navigate their arrival into enemy territory. They would row toward the islands and scope out an uninhabited area. They pulled out the oars and started their journey toward land.
Suddenly, the great storm turned into a typhoon. The waves grew to immense proportions and tossed the raft like a plastic bottle. Louie and Phil laid flat to maintain a center of gravity, and Louie tied the raft’s rope around their bodies to keep from losing it if they capsized. Both men were more scared than they had been when the Green Hornet went down.
In the pre-dawn hours, the storm ceased, and the water smoothed out. It was still dark, but Louie smelled something he hadn’t smelled in a long time—the earthy aroma of land. As the sun rose, the men saw that they’d been pushed up to the boundary of the island, which was now several small islands. They forced their shoes on and rowed toward the valley between two.
Before long, Louie saw a ship heading in their direction. The men tried to row out of sight, but it was too late. The boat pulled up next to the raft, and Louie and Phil found themselves caught in the crossfires of several guns held by Japanese soldiers.
Louie’s and Phil’s active duty ended when the Green Hornet went down, but their trials as American soldiers were just beginning. Aboard the ship, the men were tied to the mast, bound at the hands, and taunted by the Japanese soldiers. When the captain saw what was happening, he ordered his men to untie them and give them water and a biscuit. It was the first thing either had eaten in over a week.
Louie and Phil were taken to an island, where they received a full examination and treatment for their wounds. Before their doomed flight, Louie and Phil each weighed between 150 and 160 pounds. When they were weighed on the island, they discovered they’d lost half their weight.
Along with the medical treatment, Louie and Phil were given plentiful food, alcohol, and cigarettes. They were taken to a room, in which they told their story of their survival to Japanese officials. They learned they’d drifted two thousand miles to the Marshall Islands. Their raft, splayed on a table in front of them, had forty-eight bullet holes in it.
Louie and Phil were given clean beds to sleep in, and it seemed that their nightmare was over. The Japanese continued to treat them with care and concern for two more days, then they were told they were being shipped to another atoll on another island. When Louie and Phil heard the name of the island, their stomachs dropped. They were to be delivered to Kwajalein, known infamously throughout the American ranks as “Execution Island.”
On the journey to Kwajalein, the Japanese soldiers were convivial with the Americans. They were fed well and given separate quarters to sleep in. But as the freighter pulled within sight of the island, everything changed.
On July 16, they were blindfolded, fireman-carried off the freighter, and thrown in cells with just enough room for one man. Louie’s cell was infested with bugs, and only a small square window in the door ventilated the room. The air was heavy, hot, and rank from the latrine in the floor.
On one of the walls, Louie found an engraving—“Nine marines marooned on Makin Island, August 18, 1942,” the names of the men etched beneath it. Louie had heard of these marines before, as most American soldiers had. They’d been accidentally left behind after an attack and vanished. Louie was likely the first person to learn their whereabouts.
The fact that these men were nowhere in sight was ominous. Louie called out to Phil and heard a meek response from far away. They had just enough time to check on each other’s well-being before a guard came in. Louie took in his surroundings, his emaciated body, and his circumstances and started to weep. He covered his mouth to muffle his sobs.
Louie and Phil would stay on Kwajalein for 42 days. The ordeal they experienced was worse than what they’d survived on the raft, and Louie found himself wishing for death on several occasions.
Each day, Louie was given a golf ball-sized dry biscuit and a swallow of hot brown water. The biscuit was thrown through the window and shattered on the ground, leaving Louie to scramble for crumbs like a rodent. Louie soon learned that the marines had been executed, and from that day on, he waited to be pulled from his cell and beheaded.
The guards at Kwajalein seemed to find pleasure in outdoing each other with cruelty. When Louie begged for water, they threw scalding water in his face. He was poked with long sticks through the window and made to dance while they threw stones at him. Almost daily, one of the guards sliced his hand across his throat while laughing.
On at least two occasions, a submarine docked near the island, and more than 80 men came ashore and took turns abusing Louie and Phil. They threw stones and sharp sticks at the crouching men and spit on them. Phil and Louie couldn’t communicate, but they made scuffing sounds on the floor to signal that they were still alive. Under these conditions, Louie was starting to feel a loss of dignity and, with it, a diminishing will to live.
Both Louie and Phil were pulled from their cells on several occasions. Believing they were headed for execution each time, they were surprised to be taken to an interrogation room. The men were questioned about the logistics of American bombers and base sites in Hawaii. Louie told as much of the truth as he could except when it came to the bases. He pointed out the fake base sites built on Hawaii to fool Japanese bombers.
On four other occasions, Louie and Phil were taken to the infirmary, where medical experiments were performed on them. They were injected with solutions that left them dizzy, wracked with pain, and covered in rashes. That both Phil and Louie survived these experiments was lucky. Thousands of other POWs who’d undergone similar experiments died.
Finally, Louie and Phil were slated for transfer to an official POW camp in Japan. Louie was hopeful, for prisoners were supposed to receive supplies from the Red Cross at these camps and be able to make contact with their families. Also, the transfer meant they wouldn’t be executed, which had seemed likely once their usefulness to the interrogators and doctors was done. The reason they were spared execution would be a mystery for a long time.
After journeying for three weeks by ship, Louie and Phil were dropped off at Ofuna, a secret POW camp in Japan. When they arrived, Louie was granted the first bath he’d had since leaving Hawaii, then led to a room where his USC buddy Jimmie Sasaki was seated.
Louie was never privy to the suspicions and investigations surrounding Jimmie back home, so he was dumbfounded to see this man at a prison camp. They spoke for a long time, with Jimmie mostly reminiscing about their days at USC or bragging about his high-ranking position in the Japanese military. Louie thought Jimmie had been the one to authorize his stay of execution and expected something to happen after seeing him, but nothing did. Louie was taken out of the room and into the yard where he met 200 fellow prisoners.
Ofuna was not on the radar of the Red Cross because it was not registered as an official POW camp. The guards and officials who ran the camp did not abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war. Instead, the camp operated under different sets of rules instituted to break and humiliate the captives.
Prisoners could not speak or make eye contact with each other; eyes had to be cast down at all times; prisoners had to learn Japanese in order to understand instructions; each morning started with tenko, or roll call; and every aspect of camp life had to be followed to the tee. Any deviation from these rules elicited harsh beatings.
Because no one outside Japan knew about the camp, the beatings could be as vicious as the guards wanted. Death was not off the table for anyone. The guards used clubs to beat the men, and any attempt a prisoner made to protect himself or help others led to increased violence. The most feared guard of all was a man nicknamed “The Quack,” who was particularly cruel and sadistic.
The men at Ofuna were emaciated and made to starve while guards pilfered the food shipments. Rations consisted of putrid broth and contaminated rice, neither of which had any nutritional value. Dysentery was rampant, and Louie grew so thin, he could barely stand. He thought Jimmie, who visited often, would help him, but all Jimmie ever did was talk about USC. If it wasn’t for the help of two kitchen aids, who slipped Louie extra balls of rice, he likely wouldn’t have survived.
Most of the men imprisoned at Ofuna were American soldiers, either ranking officials or enlisted servicemen. Their shared training was put to use in a number of subversive ways to gain information and food.
The underground resistance movement was small and did nothing to change the men’s circumstances, but the ability to gain knowledge about the war and dupe their guards served to give each man a sense of purpose and dignity. What on the outside seemed like full compliance to the rules was actually a network of whispered communications.
Whenever guards were out of earshot, the prisoners would talk without moving their lips. Others passed information to each other by pretending to ask the guards questions in English, which they couldn’t understand. They used Morse code by tapping sticks or clicking their tongues. Others found ways to make journals out of rice paste and stole pencils to document the horrors of the camp. Louie kept detailed accounts of his time at Ofuna and the names and addresses of other men in camp and hid his diary under floorboards in his cell.
What the men wanted most of all was knowledge of the war’s progression. Whenever new POWs were brought to camp, the underground network found ways of mining them for information. Japanese newspapers appeared in camp every now and then, and the prisoners were quick to steal them and get them to American translators. One of these men was a twenty-five-year-old Marine officer named William Harris, who would become one of Louie’s closest friends and an important cog in the resistance wheel.
William Harris’s skills would serve as both a salvation and curse for the men at Ofuna. He was part of a downed mission in Japanese territory and had managed to escape. He made a run for China, stalking through the woods and consuming ants to survive. He was close to the Chinese border when he was discovered by Japanese civilians and turned in to authorities.
William was a large man, standing at 6’3”, was an actual genius, spoke five languages, and had a photographic memory. He and Louie met one day during forced exercise and formed an instant bond. Louie had not had a real comrade since Phil was taken to a different part of the camp on arrival. The two set their minds to finding more ways to subvert their captors.
William created a Japanese-English dictionary on one of the rice paste journals to help men decipher the newspapers. Louie also stole newspapers when no one was looking and took them to William, who would look at a map, memorize it, and recreate it on a scrap of paper. Through these tactics, the prisoners learned that the allies were winning the war, which helped inspire them and give them hope for rescue. But that hope came with a weighty fear.
All over Japan, thousands of POWs were falling victim to the “kill order,” or the Japanese military policy to never allow prisoners to be recaptured by the allies. If an invasion was imminent, the guards were ordered to kill all the men. If the allies kept advancing, Louie and the others wondered if they’d survive long enough to see victory.
In all facets of Louie’s life, loss was being felt. Louie first felt this loss in spring 1944 when Phil was transferred from Ofuna to another POW camp. The two men, who’d experienced so much together, only had a few moments to bid farewell. Phil and Louie said goodbye and promised to reconnect in the future when all of their struggles were over. Louie believed his friend was going to an official camp, but Phil was taken to another secret camp that sold the prisoners to local businesses for slave labor.
Across the pond, Louie’s family was also confronting loss. When word of Louie’s disappearance hit Torrance in June 1943, the townspeople began to mourn the loss of their local hero. But Louie’s family was different. Neither Louise nor Albert believed their son was dead. Even his siblings felt Louie’s presence in the world, and no matter what the official reports suggested, they were staunch in their beliefs that Louie was alive. Not even the arrival of his war trunk from Hawaii could shake their resolve.
In another part of the world, Joe Deasy was experiencing a feeling of grief over his friend Louie. The Americans had seized Kwajalein during an air attack, and transcripts of Japanese reports from the island were discovered. In them were the recorded interviews of Louie and Phil detailing their crash and survival by raft. The reports landed on Deasy’s desk, and he became consumed with guilt about overlooking them during the search and whatever fate had befallen them.
Because there was no information about what had happened to the men after their interrogation, neither family was told of the discovery. Phil’s family remained as steadfast in their belief that Phil was still alive as Louie’s. Phil’s fiancé, Cecy, even quit her job in Indiana and moved to Washington DC to be closer to information. After thirteen months, Louie, Phil, and the rest of the Green Hornet crew were officially declared dead. This news changed nothing for either family.
Louie’s fight for his life was far from over, and his will would be tested several times in the months to come. During the winter, Louie and William met Frank Tinker, another officer, and the three spent most of their time together. Winter turned to spring and spring to summer, and the situation at Ofuna continued to deteriorate. By summer 1944, Louie, William, and Tinker had formed a plan to escape.
First, the food situation was becoming more dire. Rations had been cut in half that spring, and men were slipping into desperate states. Louie became so desperate for food, he stole an onion and split it with other men. He stole miso paste and chestnuts from the kitchen after dark. He even volunteered to serve as a barber for the guards, despite understanding the consequences if he cut any of them with the straight blade, because the pay was one rice ball per cut.
There were also great infestations of fleas and lice throughout the camp, brought on by the summer heat. Louie and the others were covered in bites and itched like crazy.
More news about the war had also entered camp, and the POWs knew the allies were getting closer. Every day the allies advanced, the lives of the prisoners were put in more jeopardy with the looming kill order.
Finally, Louie learned from another prisoner, Fred Garrett, who was also from Southern California, that he’d been declared dead. Louie worried about how his mother would handle the news of his death and wanted to be able to tell her he was alive.
All of these factors were enough to spark the idea of escape in Louie’s mind after he heard airplanes in the distance. He knew there was an airfield nearby, and if he and his friends could make it there, they could steal a plane and flee.
The plan to escape was meticulously crafted and put into motion, but a couple of events would thwart the men’s efforts.
At first, Louie, William, and Tinker planned to sneak out of camp and hike to the airstrip, but they’d been blindfolded upon entry and had no idea what direction to go in. Then, a friendly guard, working on the assumption that the men didn’t understand Japanese, gave them an almanac so they could look at the pictures. With William’s fluency, the almanac gave them detailed descriptions of Japanese ports, types of vessels, and distances between various locations.
With this new knowledge, they abandoned the plane plan and decided to steal a boat instead. If they could make it to the western shore of Japan, they could take a boat to China. The only issue was the 150-mile hike to the western coast with wasted bodies and distinguishable American features. They decided they would travel only by night, but even if they were captured, it was better to die trying to survive than it was at the hands of the guards.
For two months, the men trained. They walked as often as possible to strengthen their legs, studied the shift schedules of the guards, and stole tools. The day of departure was approaching, and Louie was filled with a fearful giddiness. Then, right before they were set to leave, a prisoner at another camp escaped. A new decree was delivered to the men at Ofuna: anyone caught escaping would die, and for each man who attempted or succeeded, several others would be killed in their name. Louie and his conspirators put the plan on hold.
The three men likely would have tried again, but another event ended that possibility for good. One afternoon, William was in another prisoner’s cell discussing the war when the Quack walked in. He saw William holding a hand-drawn map and searched his cell, turning up the other maps, dictionary, and news clippings he’d been hiding. William was beaten for an hour by the Quack in front of all the prisoners, even after he’d fallen unconscious.
In the days to come, William would regain consciousness, but he was essentially an invalid and mentally impaired. He didn’t recognize anyone anymore, not even Louie, who helped feed him and get him back on his feet.
Shortly after, Louie, Tinker, and several other men were slated for transfer to a different POW camp. Again, Louie felt the false hope of being delivered to an official registered camp. On September 30, Louie said goodbye to a dazed William, stuck his journal in his clothes, and left Ofuna one year and 15 days after arriving. He had no idea the worst was yet to come.
Whatever Louie and the other men had experienced at Ofuna would soon pale in comparison to life at their new POW camp: Omori. A Japanese corporal named Mutsuhiro Watanabe was in charge of disciplinary measures, and none of them, especially Louie, would be spared his wrath.
Omori was on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay connected to the main city by a bamboo-slat bridge. Watanabe had arrived in winter 1943 and soon became one of the most feared guards in the country. His tactics were so ferocious, Omori became known as “punishment camp.” The prisoners had many names for Watanabe, but the one used the most was “the Bird.”
Watanabe was from an affluent, privileged family. He studied French literature at university and moved to Tokyo to work in a newsroom after graduating in 1942. When Japan went to war, he quit his job and enlisted. Watanabe’s sights were set on becoming an officer, like his brother, and felt his privilege and education made him a certain candidate. But he was passed over for promotions and told he would never move beyond corporal. That decision would be the catalyst for the suffering of hundreds of men in the years to come.
Bitter and resentful of high-ranking men, Watanabe’s angst grew after he was transferred to Omori. A post at a POW camp was considered the lowest rung on the military’s ladder. His sense of dismissal unleashed a monster inside, and he took his anger out on the prisoners. He was known for his savage beatings, which left men with broken windpipes, ruptured eardrums, broken teeth, and a torn ear in one circumstance.
Watanabe was a sexual sadist and derived pleasure from inflicting pain on others. He destroyed prisoner’s family photos and burned letters from home in front of them. He’d demand to be called a different name each day and punished those who forgot. He forced men to violate camp rules, then beat them for it. Men would later recall a small sag in his right eye immediately before a violent tirade occurred.
However, underneath the brutality was a desperate need to be liked and accepted. Often, Watanabe would show remorse following a beating, crying and apologizing and offering the men cigarettes and candy to win their affections. But these reprieves never lasted long, and within an hour of apologizing, he’d flare into another rage and another round of abuse. He had a particular taste for abusing officers and men who’d been successful as civilians, and as an officer and former Olympian, Louie was the perfect target.
The Bird’s interest in Louie started from the moment he saw him. That first day, Louie and the other Ofuna prisoners were told to stand outside the front gates of Omori. The Bird lounged against the gates, for several minutes, casually eyeing the prisoners without speaking. Then, he was suddenly in their faces, screaming and demanding their names.
When Louie looked in his eyes, he saw madness and looked away. The Bird punched him in the head and demanded that Louie look him in the eye. When Louie did, the Bird punched him again and said not to look him in the eye. That was the moment the men realized they were dealing with a psychopath and when the Bird started his greatest hobby—terrorizing Louie.
The Bird referred to Louie as “number one prisoner” and beat him daily. Louie tried to blend in with other prisoners and hide, but the Bird hunted him like prey and always found him. Louie was desperate for someone to save him, but the only ally the men had at camp was another guard, Private Kano, who often helped the prisoners behind the Bird’s back. He snuck them extra blankets on winter nights, looked the other way when they stole food, and helped sick men visit a POW doctor instead of the merciless camp physician. Despite Kano’s benevolence, there was nothing he could do for Louie.
The abuse weighed heavily on Louie. The Bird was the first thing he thought about each morning, and he fantasized about strangling his abuser. That same childhood insolence made Louie defiant, and he refused to show weakness during beatings. To Watanabe, whose mission in life was to command subservience, Louie’s boldness only made things worse.
The conditions at Omori were about the same as those at Ofuna. The food was similar in quality and portion size. Louie’s already emaciated condition worsened, as did the other men’s. In total, there were approximately 900 men imprisoned at Omori. Many were from allied countries, such as England and Scotland.
The main difference between the two camps was the slave labor. As part of the Geneva Convention, prisoners could be forced to work as long as they were paid, healthy, and not involved in the war effort. Officers were exempt from working. But after meeting Louie, the Bird decided officers would have to work. They were kept at camp and forced to sew materials for the Japanese Army while the enlisted men were sent out to work 10 to 11 hours a day in shipyards, mines, and fields or build railroad tracks throughout the countryside.
Like Ofuna, a subversive movement had formed among the slave laborers that involved sabotage and stealing. Workers put incorrect mailing labels on war supplies, destabilized train tracks, and sunk barges, all under the noses of the distracted guards. They confiscated shipments and destroyed the contents and stole food and sugar from other shipments. When they returned to camp, their pant legs would be filled with confiscated loot. A black market emerged among the prisoners, and the stolen goods helped save hundreds of lives.
Another way Omori differed from Ofuna was that it was a legitimate POW camp. Prisoners were registered with the Red Cross so word could get back to their countries, and up until the Bird arrived, men had been able to write letters home. However, Louie was not registered with everyone else. The camp officials had something else in mind for him, but Louie wouldn’t learn what that was for some time.
On November 1, 1944, a new American plane left a base on the captured island of Saipan in the Pacific. The plane was massive, standing at 30 feet tall, almost 100 feet long, and 141 feet wide, making the B-24 look like a private jet. The plane was the B-29 Superfortress and could make the long trip to Japan and back easily, something the B-24 didn’t have the capacity to do. B-29s had started appearing over Japan in the previous months, and the Japanese were terrified of it.
That day, pilot Ralph Steakly flew over Tokyo on a reconnaissance mission. At Omori, Louie and other officers were in the yard doing forced exercises when a siren went off. The prisoners were ushered toward the barracks, but before Louie stepped inside, he saw a slim white light flashing over Tokyo. A new POW shouted that it was the new American B-29, and the prisoners cheered. While the POWs chanted B-29, the Japanese stared frozen at the plane.
The sight of the plane incensed the Bird, and he took it out on Louie. Shortly after the flyby, the Bird marched into the barracks and accused Louie of being slow to come to attention, even though he’d jumped up with everyone else. He took his belt off and whipped the large buckle at Louie’s head. The buckle hit Louie in the temple and ear and knocked him to the ground. The Bird handed Louie a tissue and cooed over him until he could stand. As soon as Louie was on his feet, the buckle connected again, and Louie went down and stayed down.
For many weeks afterward, Louie was deaf in one ear. The daily beatings continued, and Louie was beginning to disintegrate emotionally and psychologically. Every day, he prayed for God to save him.
Not long after the B-29 sighting, two radio producers from Tokyo’s propaganda station approached Louie about doing a broadcast. His official death notice had been printed in the United States, and they offered him a chance to reach out to his family and correct the wrong. Louie was dubious, but he said he’d do it as long as he didn’t have to read propaganda.
Louie worked on his speech for the broadcast and added specifics only his family would know, the names of other POWs believed dead, and compliments about his captors to ensure the speech was aired. After delivering the broadcast, Louie told one producer about the Bird’s abuse at Omori. The producer said he’d look into it.
Across the Pacific, a woman named Lynn Moody was working the graveyard shift at the Office of War Information in San Francisco. At 2:30 in the morning, a colleague asked her to fill in transcribing Japanese broadcasts while they took a break. Over the airwaves, Lynn heard a voice she knew. She’d been a USC graduate and friends with Louie.
Lynn shouted with joy and typed up the transcript as fast as she could. A copy was mailed to the Zamperinis in Torrance, and the family finally had their answer. Louie was alive. Their jubilation was immense.
Days later, the producers came back and said they wanted Louie to make another broadcast because of his lovely voice. This time, when Louie arrived, they handed him a speech they’d written. The speech was riddled with ridiculous American colloquialisms and ridiculed the American government for falsely declaring Louie dead.
Louie was shocked and refused to read the speech. The producers tried to persuade him with a lavish American meal and a comfortable bedroom with a bed and clean sheets. If Louie gave the broadcast, he could live there and never see Omori again. But Louie was adamant that he would not become a propaganda tool for the enemy. Round and round they went, and the request quickly turned to threats. Still, Louie refused, and when he was sent back to Omori, the Bird was waiting for him.
The experience at the radio station gave Louie the answers he’d been looking for since Kwajalein. He’d always wondered why he was spared execution and transferred to Omori to live under the Bird’s thumb. Now he knew that the Japanese wanted to exploit his status as an Olympian to disparage the U.S. government to the American people and had delivered Louie to the Bird to be beaten into compliance. But Louie would never give in.
On the morning of November 24, the Americans arrived in Tokyo. The sirens went off, and everyone at Omori, including the guards, stopped what they were doing and marveled at a tremendous sight. One hundred and eleven B-29s were swarming Tokyo to bomb an aircraft factory on the city’s cusp. The prisoners shouted with glee and pride.
Sirens and B-29 sightings became daily events. Each day of bombing made the Bird dwindle farther into madness. He took away the minor luxuries from the prisoners, such as smoking and playing cards, and started forcing them to line up at attention regularly in the yard. He’d run up and down the line waving his sword above their heads.
The Bird’s aggression toward Louie also reached pivotal heights once the bombings started. The Bird ran through the camp in search of Louie, then charged at him with fists flying, pounding him until Louie was bleeding on the ground. Louie started dreaming of the Bird beating him with the buckle.
Louie wasn’t only suffering because of the incessant beatings. He was also starving to death. Twice, Red Cross shipments had come in, and twice, the camp officials pilfered what they wanted and stored the rest. In one shipment of 227 boxes of supplies, the Bird alone took 42, or 500 pounds of food. If things didn’t change soon, Louie and the others would perish. Whether it was from abuse or starvation, the Bird would be responsible.
Inexplicably, the Bird stopped abusing the men after Christmas, including Louie. Over the last year, a dignitary had visited Omori and met with a POW named Lewis Bush, who told the prince about the Bird’s abuse. The prince was disturbed by Bush’s reports and spoke with the Japanese war office and the Red Cross. Because of the dignitary’s persistence, the Bird was reassigned to a new camp. The Bird threw himself a massive going away party, forcing many POW officers to join him. When Louie heard the news, he practically fainted.
The morning after the party, the Bird walked across the bridge to Tokyo. The monster of Omori camp was gone. Life was exponentially better at Omori after that. Private Kano took over, and POWs were once again allowed to write and receive letters. Louie wrote several to his parents and Pete, but most of them wouldn’t arrive until long after the war ended.
Another surprise occurred in mid-January. Several men from Ofuna crossed the bridge to the camp. Among them was the high-ranking Commander Fitzgerald and Louie’s friend William Harris. When Louie saw William, he shuddered. Harris had been continually beaten by the Quack and was stuck in a mental fog. The Omori doctor examined him and said he was dying.
With the Bird gone, Private Kano ordered the Red Cross boxes to be removed from storage and given to the prisoners. When Louie received his rations, he gave them to William despite his grave hunger, and with the extra food, William started to come back to life.
The bombings over Tokyo continued, and the camp guards became increasingly anxious. The POWs were also anxious. Word had spread that 150 POWs had been executed as part of the kill order in the Philippines when an American invasion seemed imminent.
In February, the largest air battle yet over Japan took place above Omori, in which 1,500 American planes fought several hundred Japanese planes, sending bullets and plane parts flying through the sky. When it was over, Japan had lost 500 planes, but the United States had lost only 80. Seven days after the battle, B-29s lit up Tokyo like a roman candle.
Not long after, Louie and fourteen other officers, including Tinker and Commander Fitzgerald, were transferred to a new camp. This camp was called Naoetsu and was stationed above a coastal town in the mountains. Louie was sad to be leaving William again, and when the two said goodbye, it was the last time they ever saw each other.
Naoetsu was covered in four feet of snow. However, the biting weather wasn’t the worst thing about the camp. When Louie and the others were delivered to the camp, Louie experienced the most bleak moment of his life to date. Greeting the POWs like old friends who’d come to visit was the Bird. After two months of peace, Louie was back in hell.
Louie’s beatings began almost immediately. For the other Omori POWs, the beatings were nothing new. But for the almost 300 Australians who’d been imprisoned there since 1942, the raw violence against Louie was shocking. Considering what those prisoners had experienced at Naoetsu over the last three years, their response was notable.
Temperatures often plummeted to below zero atop the mountain, and the barracks, a two-story building on a cliff overlooking a frozen river, were so poorly built, it snowed indoors. Most of the men were forced to work at one of several industrial plants or coal mines, sometimes for 18 hours a day. During 1943 and 1944, 60 Australian POWs, or one in five men, died.
Louie’s arrival at Naoetsu would mark the worst time during all of his war experiences. At the precise time that Louie was lining up for roll call in the snow, Americans were celebrating him with the inaugural Louis Zamperini Invitational, a track event held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The winner of the mile was four seconds slower than Louie’s casual run that day long ago in Hawaii.
Louie fell into a deep despair back in the clutches of the Bird. The beatings were daily, and the winter passed in much the same way it had at Omori. Once again, the Bird decided that officers would have to work. They were assigned field duty, and although the walk to the fields was six miles each way, the work of digging and planting was nothing compared to the labor the enlisted men had to endure. The supervisor was friendly and allowed them to drink all they wanted from a fresh-water well. Even though the work violated the Geneva Convention, it got the men away from the Bird all day, which was a blessing.
However, one day, the field supervisor innocently joked that the Bird’s prisoners were lazy. Although the comment was made in jest, the Bird went into a rage and ordered the officers to work hard labor in the coal mines with everyone else.
Louie and the other officers shoveled and hauled coal day in and day out, with one estimate suggesting that each man hauled around four tons of coal a day. The guards pushed them to move faster and faster, and often the whole day would go by without food or the ability to stand up straight.
One day, Louie was hauling coal up a railcar ramp when a guard elbowed him in the side. Louie fell off the ramp and injured one ankle and knee so badly, he couldn’t put weight on that leg. Louie was relegated to the camp, which meant he was alone all day with the Bird. Because he wasn’t working, he only received a half ration of food. He was injured and starving and spiked a fever of 104.
Louie begged the Bird for work to increase his rations. The Bird assigned Louie to clean out the pig sty, providing no tools. Louie spent his days picking up pig feces with his hands and shoveling as much feed into his mouth as he could to stave off death. Out of everything he’d endured to date, this work was the thing that finally broke Louie. The only thing that kept him alive was the faint hope of rescue.
On May 5, 1945, a B-29 circled above the village of Naoetsu and adjoining steel mill, where POWs were working. From inside, the workers heard a loud boom and felt a shower of dust from the rafters above. The Japanese ran to shelters, and the POWs huddled together. A bomb had missed the factory and landed in a nearby field.
News of the war’s progress was kept from the prisoners at Naoetsu, but the bombing by the B-29 told an inspiring story. If the Americans were taking time to bomb one factory on the far side of Japan, the other major cities and targets must already be gone. The Japanese were losing the war.
The POWs suspicions were confirmed days later when four hundred new arrivals from other camps wandered into the Naoetsu camp. The new POWs spread some encouraging but sobering news—Germany had surrendered, but Japan was still fighting the war.
The POWs knew from the guards that Japan would never surrender. It was against their cultural code to admit defeat. They would continue to fight, and if necessary, they would execute the kill order. In fact, all over Japan, camp officials had received orders to liquidate the prisoners on August 22.
By June, Louie could again put pressure on his leg and was sent back to the mines. The abuse from the Bird continued, and with the approaching allies, his sadistic tendencies took on great heights.
When several POWs were caught stealing food at the mines, The Bird called all the prisoners into the yard and lined them up. The thieves were brought forward, as were Louie, Tinker, and another officer, who were held responsible for the actions of the enlisted men. As punishment, each enlisted man was to punch the guilty parties in the face as hard as he could. Anyone who refused would join the culprits, and anyone who didn’t use maximum force would be clubbed.
For more than two hours, Louie and the others endured 220 punches to the face while the Bird watched like a hawk. When one man fell, he was hoisted back up, and the punching continued. Louie’s face was so swollen, he couldn’t open his mouth for days.
All over camp, things were deteriorating. The extra men had not created extra food, and the rations were smaller than ever. Louie was struggling. Dysentery wreaked dangerous havoc on his body, and the continued beatings made him weaker and weaker.
Fearing death, Louie went to seek help from the doctor without permission. When the Bird found out, he pushed Louie into the yard and told him to pick up a thick wooden beam six feet in length. Louie was to hold the beam above his head, and if he lowered his arms at all, a guard would hit Louie with his gun. The Bird climbed onto a roof and waited.
Louie set his gaze on the Bird and hoisted the beam in the air. Minutes passed, and as the Bird laughed at him, Louie’s arms began to falter. At one point, his arms dipped, and a guard rammed the butt of his gun into Louie’s stomach. Louie straightened up, but he was woozy and felt like he was going to pass out. His arms were numb, and the earth tilted. Only one thought ran through his mind: “He cannot break me.”
The longer Louie stood with the beam, the more angry the Bird grew. Finally, the Bird jumped down and rammed his fist into Louie’s gut. Louie lurched forward, dropping the beam on his head, which knocked him unconscious. Another officer had looked at the camp clock both when Louie lifted the beam and when he dropped it. Louie had held the beam for 37 minutes.
On August 1, 836 B-29s swarmed the skies above Japan and dropped 5 million leaflets warning civilians about an upcoming massive attack. The leaflet urged them to evacuate, but the Japanese government forbade it. Anyone found in possession of the leaflet was arrested.
In the early hours of August 6, a B-29 carrying a nine-thousand-pound, twelve-foot-long bomb named “Little Boy” took off for Japan. The pilot, Paul Tibbets, flew for hours until the city of Hiroshima appeared before him. He told his crew to put on special goggles and drop the bomb. Tibbets turned the plane and flew at great speed to put as much distance between the plane and the coming blast.
As Tibbets flew at great speed away from the drop site, an immense white light swallowed them, followed by a tremendous noise and sonic reverberations. The fillings in Tibbet’s mouth began to tingle, and his co-pilot made a note in his diary: “My God.” Below them, a great cloud of swirling colors rose three miles into the air.
At camp, Louie and the others heard rumors about one American bomb that destroyed a whole city. They didn’t believe such a thing could happen, but someone found a newspaper describing an electronic bomb that had killed many people. Three days later, on August 9, Nagasaki was demolished in the same way.
The atom bombs changed everything. With two cities virtually wiped from existence, the Japanese surrender would follow shortly. Although life at camp seemed unchanged, the POWs could tell something was off. The Bird started making trips away from the camp, and the violence had abruptly ceased. The sudden relief was nearing too little too late for Louie.
Louie spent most days suffering in bed. He was tormented by fevered dreams of battles to the death with the Bird and vomited frequently. When he touched his legs, his fingers left indentations. Louie had contracted beriberi, a life-threatening vitamin B deficiency that can lead to heart failure, paralysis, and death.
On August 15, the POWs at the camp and work stations noticed something strange—silence. The Japanese guards had disappeared. At camp, Tinker found them huddled in an office around a radio, but he couldn’t tell what was being said. At the worksite, one guard told a POW that the war was over. The POW told the others back at camp, but no one knew what to believe. Still, for the first time in months, no planes flew overhead and no sirens went off. The men were cautious of this news. The kill date was only a week away.
The morning of August 20, the camp commander gathered the seven hundred POWs in the yard and announced that fighting had ceased. He said they could bathe in the nearby river, something they’d never been allowed to do.
Louie stumbled into the water with the others. Suddenly, a loud rumble thrashed through the sky, and the men looked up to see a bomber heading straight toward them. It wasn’t until the plane was directly overhead that they saw American emblems on the side.
The men laughed, cried, and wagged their arms at the waving pilot. They rushed back to camp and set part of it on fire. The pilot dropped bars of chocolate, cartons of cigarettes, and a note that supplies would be delivered soon. Inside the package was also a magazine with a picture of the nuclear cloud over Hiroshima. The cheers died down, and the men stared in shock.
Some of the men went to find the Bird, but he was already gone. At some point over the last day, the Bird had shed his uniform, grabbed a bag of provisions, and vanished. For Louie, the moment was different. He didn’t have enough strength for the jubilant celebration. Louie stood still, barely able to hold himself up, and thought one phrase over and over: “I’m free.”
The task of providing supplies to POWs and liberating the camps was a massive endeavor that took time. Being on the far side of Japan, Naoetsu was down on the list of sites. Six days after the war’s end, supplies still hadn’t come. Fighter planes flew over and dropped notes stating that they had exhausted their supplies but would be back soon. As a consolation, the pilots performed a 30-minute airshow for the cheering men below.
When the American planes returned, they dropped hundreds of bags of food. The provisions were spread out evenly, but they still weren’t enough. Commander Fitzgerald had men use lime to write a message on the road: “700 PWs Here.”
The message worked. Three days later, the fighter planes were replaced by six B-29s, and pallets of supplies started falling from the sky. There were peaches, vegetables, shoes, medicine, clothing, cigarettes, magazines, and other treats. From the magazines, the POWs learned that the Japanese had hidden the ending of the war from them for five days.
So many pallets dropped that everyone had more than they could handle. In their euphoria, Louie and the others felt a release of their fear and anger toward their captors and embraced a spirit of love and gratitude. They shared the excess supplies with civilians and gave packages to the guards to take home to their families.
Louie put on weight and washed the shirt he’d been wearing since the day he climbed aboard the Green Hornet. There were other clothes to wear, but his shirt had become part of him.
One morning, a B-29 flew over and turned on a radio broadcast over the speakers. The voice was of an American general aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. The man was standing with Japanese officials and other American servicemen. Among them was William Harris. He’d survived Omori. Surrender papers were signed by the Japanese, and on September 2, 1945, WWII ended.
The allied armies were busy arranging trains to transport the POWs to different air bases around the country. The train for Naoetsu was slated to come September 4, but it never showed. Commander Fitzgerald, like the others, was tired of being at the camp. He marched to the train station and demanded a ten-car train be prepared for them the next morning. His fist was persuasive with the Japanese engineer, and the next morning, the train was waiting.
The POWs huddled in the yard, eager to get back to their loved ones. Each man stood with his countrymen behind their flags, and they marched in procession through the gates of the camp with dignity. Louie turned and looked at the camp one last time, then waved goodbye to it and the war.
When the trainful of men departed the station, the last thing they saw was a line of Japanese. Civilians and camp personnel stood facing the train, each one with their hands raised in salute. The POWs were finally going home.
The Scope of the Tragedy
The carnage left in Japan’s wake was astounding. Although official records differ slightly, most provide similar statistics as those that follow:
More than 130,000 POWs were held in Japan from the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands. Of those, 36,000—or 1 in 4 men—died. Of the Americans held, the death toll totals 37%.
The causes of death for POWs include starvation, beatings, medical experiments, preventable diseases, and kill-order executions. Some 16,000 men died during death marches or from slave labor, including those who were forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Along with those men, approximately 100,000 Asian slave-laborers perished, as well.
There were at least 215,000 POWs from other countries and thousands more slave laborers. The death statistics for them are unknown, as are the number of men who were killed immediately upon capture or executed at places like Kwajalein.
Louie was taken to an Okinawan hospital after he and the other Naoetsu men arrived at the train station. An American journalist interviewed Louie and heard his entire tale, starting with the crash of the Green Hornet. When the journalist asked if Louie could sum up his experience, Louie said if he knew he had to do it again, he’d commit suicide.
Louie was still weak and sick with dysentery, and he learned his ankle injury would likely be the end of his running career. After 10 days on the island, Louie was transferred to a hospital in Honolulu, where he was greeted with fanfare, a new uniform, and a promotion to captain. After changing into his new clothes, Louie left his room only to realize later that he’d left his old shirt lying out. When he learned it had been thrown away, he was crushed.
In San Diego, Pete was awoken by a friend on a September morning and given a copy of the LA Times. The headline sent him leaping through the air: “Zamperini Comes Back from the Dead.” It would be weeks before Louie was shipped back to the mainland, but when Pete learned he was taken to a hospital in San Francisco, Pete went AWOL and hitched a ride north. In mid-October, the brothers reunited in grand fashion. Louie was finally healed of dysentery and in good spirits, and Phil’s concerns about Louie’s mental health were assuaged. The brothers boarded a plane for Long Beach a few days later, and when the plane stopped, Louie jumped from it and ran to the waiting arms of his family.
The family had a hearty celebration waiting for Louie at the house. The table was stacked with a feast and three years of Christmas and birthday presents. They ate, talked, and sank into a long-awaited merriment. No one talked about the war or the prison camps, and everyone was pleased to see Louie doing so well.
As a surprise, Louise pulled out a copy of Louie’s radio broadcast she’d received from Lynn Moody. There was no way Louise could have known the events surrounding the broadcast or the trauma hearing it would cause her son. When she played it, Louie became undone. He started screaming and shaking and shouted for her to turn it off and break it into pieces. The previous joy was gone. Louie walked upstairs to his old room and dreamt of the Bird.
Louie was an instant celebrity back home. Thousands of people wrote him letters, and the paparazzi tracked his every move. The military sent him on speaking tours, and many of them came with awards. Within his first weeks home, Louie gave 95 speeches across the country. All of the recanting and attention became too overwhelming, and he began to suffer.
No one knew the extent to which Louie was experiencing PTSD. His dreams were flooded with the Bird, and he started to experience anxiety attacks. The only relief he felt was when he’d drive into the mountains and take in the serenity of nature. But real life always beckoned, and Louie felt the increasing strain of his public life.
At one event, Louie was eating dinner before his speech and had a couple of drinks. He delivered his speech in a tipsy fog and discovered that the alcohol softened his anxiety. At the next speech, he drank three Irish coffees before walking on stage and again felt relieved. A pattern was beginning to form.
Louie’s drinking became more common, and he’d often find himself in bars in the evenings. One spring night in Miami Beach, as Louie drank at the bar, a beautiful blonde entered and stole his heart. He would later tell his sister that after seeing her, he knew she would be his wife. Her name was Cynthia Applewhite, and she was the 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy, upscale family.
Cynthia told Louie about seeing the newsreel about his NCAA championship race in 1938, when the other racers had spiked his legs. She’d never forgotten that story. She was smitten, and within two weeks, she and Louie were engaged.
After Louie left Miami Beach, he and Cynthia wrote letters to each other daily. Louie was concerned that Cynthia didn’t know how much he was struggling since the war and tried to warn her, but Cynthia said it didn’t matter. She didn’t know the extent of what he’d been through, but she promised to make it all go away. Louie slipped into the warmth of that promise completely.
In California, Louie threw himself into wedding plans. He stopped drinking and smoking and looked for work. He taught actors how to ride horses at Warner Bros. Studios, but the pay was low, and with no degree, no skills besides running, and an overabundance of returning vets snatching up jobs and affordable housing, Louie’s future prospects were dim.
The stress of the wedding and fending off his memories was getting to Louie. To make matters worse, Cynthia’s parents didn’t approve of the marriage. They thought their daughter was acting hastily and wanted her to wait until the fall to marry at the family estate.
But Louie started to become paranoid that something terrible would happen, a symptom of the violence and trauma he’d endured for two years. When Cynthia came to visit California, he accused her of not loving him. To prove her love, she agreed to marry him that night. They drove to a small church, where Louie’s family and a few friends were waiting, and got married on May 25, 1946.
That evening, Cynthia called her mother from their hotel and told her the news. A lengthy and emotional argument ensued, and Louie couldn’t take it. He popped open a bottle of champagne, drank the whole thing, and fell asleep.
Toward the end of 1946, Cynthia would learn just how deep Louie’s pain ran. The couple was having dinner in Hollywood with Phil, Fred Garrett, and their wives. It was the first time Louie and Phil had seen each other since Phil’s departure from Ofuna in 1944.
The evening was off to a great start. Everyone was in joyful moods, and the horrors of the men’s pasts seemed far away. But when the dinners came, Fred took one look at the neat pile of white rice on his plate and lost it. He screamed wildly until the dish was taken away, and although Louie was able to calm him down, it was clear that their pasts were never out of reach.
Life moved forward for Cynthia and Louie, but the strain of being a good husband weighed on his shoulders. He was 30 years old with no job, no interest in finding one, and living in a friend’s mother’s home. Louie made several small investments with the money he did have and soon earned enough to rent a small apartment in Los Angeles, but the income was always temporary.
Around this time, Louie started to feel his mind turning to the one thing he knew how to do. The return of the Summer Olympics would be in London in 1948, and Louie wanted to be part of them. His ankle seemed healed, and he’d been hiking in the mountains more and more. He decided if he started training now, he could be ready to compete in two years.
Louie began training with gusto. His body felt strong, and his ankle was holding up. But where running once felt natural and freeing, now it felt like a chore he labored through. There was no enjoyment in it. It was a means to an end, and it helped keep the bad thoughts away.
On one training run, Louie wanted to see how fast he could clock a two miles. The first mile went well, but as he headed into the second, he felt pain in his ankle. He knew he should stop, but he couldn’t. By the time he crossed the finish line, he was hobbling. Louie ran those two miles faster than anyone on the coast would that year, but it was all for nothing. He couldn’t walk for a week, and the doctors confirmed that his injury had worsened. His running career and Olympic dreams ended for good.
Without running, Louie was trapped in his mind. Day and night, thoughts of the Bird consumed him. He was terrified of his dreams and started smoking and drinking again to get by. His anger took over, and he lashed out at random strangers. Once, he jumped from his car and punched a man for walking too slowly across the street.
His trauma also started showing up in other ways. If he heard a loud sound, he’d cower and shake on the floor. If someone yelled near him, he’d jump to attention and wait to be beaten, hearing the voice of the Bird. He started to experience flashbacks of being back in the camp and could feel the sensation of lice crawling on his skin.
Nothing worked to bring Louie back to a good place. He was floundering and needed something to hold onto. He found it in a single idea that became his obsession. If he could get back to Japan, he could hunt down the Bird and kill him.
The Aftermath at Home
The men who were held by the Japanese, known as Pacific POWs, suffered greatly after the war. Most of them had lost an average of 60 pounds while imprisoned, and the consequences of their abuse left permanent scars on their lives.
Many came home with tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, anemia, eye ailments, broken bones, and open sores. Of the Canadian POWs, 84% suffered from neurologic damage, and others had respiratory disorders from long hours of slave labor in factories and mines. Some men were forever physically impaired from poorly set or healed bones, and some went blind from years of malnutrition. For some, the damage was too severe, and they could not be saved.
Many studies were conducted on the health of Pacific POWs in the years and decades following the war. The first two years after the war, Pacific POWs died four times faster than men their age. Twenty-two years later, these POWs were hospitalized for various conditions eight times more often than European POWs.
Mentally, the damage was just as severe. Six years after the war, Pacific POWs were diagnosed with psychoneurosis more than any other disorder. Forty years later, 85% still had PTSD. A 1987 study found that 8 in 10 men had psychiatric impairment, 6 in 10 anxiety, and 1 in 5 depression. These men were 30% more likely to kill themselves than the regular population.
Pacific POWs reported experiencing crippling flashbacks, where they would be transported back to the camps, the sensation as real as the world around them. They suffered from nightmares, night terrors, and violent bursts of aggression. Some couldn’t sleep in beds, were scared of passing planes, hoarded food, and would randomly speak Japanese.
A quarter of all Pacific POWs were diagnosed with alcoholism, and all of them struggled to reclaim a sense of dignity in their lives. Some never would.
Louie’s desire to find the Bird was not unique. In Japan, a massive manhunt was underway for forty war crime suspects. Among those names was Mutsuhiro Watanabe. More than 250 POWs had provided statements about their experiences, detailing the gruesome abuse and torment they experienced. The Bird’s name popped up in all of them.
The United States government had an 84-count indictment against the Bird in one document that stretched eight feet in length. Only a small portion of his crimes were listed, and Louie’s affidavit only accounted for one count. Still, Watanabe was a wanted man, and the Japanese working under the authority of the United States hunted him with fervor.
After leaving Naoetsu, the Bird ran to his mother’s village and hid in her home. But when he learned that he was a wanted man after a couple of weeks, he fled. He knew capture would mean execution, and he decided the best course of action would be to vanish from existence.
Everyone in the Bird’s life became a target in the investigation. The police questioned relatives and monitored their communications. They staked out his mother’s house and questioned associates from all periods of his life, even childhood. They distributed his picture around the country, but nothing worked. Watanabe had disappeared.
Watanabe had taken the disguise of Saburo Ohta, a Tokyo refugee, after leaving his mother’s house. He found a job with the farmer that provided room and board and settled into farm life. In the evenings, he wrote about his saga in a journal. In one breath, he seemed to feel guilty when he thought of the soldiers, but in another, he described himself as powerful and strict and excused his actions as merely part of the job. At no point did he show real remorse.
Fugitive life was stressful, and Watanabe wavered between running and surrendering. But as months passed with no sign of police and a summer spent traveling with the farmer’s son with no one recognizing him, Watanabe started to relax and felt a longing to see his family.
In summer 1946, Watanabe went to his sister’s house in Tokyo. His family told him about being surveilled and daily visits by detectives. They urged Watanabe to leave before the detectives arrived, but the afternoon stretched long, and he was still in the house when the police came. Watanabe hid, and although the detectives stood inches from his hiding spot, he was not found.
After this visit, Watanabe went back to the farm and met a woman. They fell in love, but the pressure of sustaining his fake identity wore on him. He broke things off and left the village.
That fall, two bodies were discovered in the mountains in what appeared to be a murder-suicide. The bodies were of a man and woman. The police took Watanabe’s mother to see the bodies, and she identified the man as her son.
In Hollywood, Louie heard nothing about the Bird’s death. By fall 1946, Louie was a full-blown alcoholic and suffering from severe psychological distress. His whole world had become dedicated to his mission to kill the Bird.
The following years, 1947 and 1948, saw Louie bouncing between various get-rich-quick schemes to fund his trip back to Japan. Many of the schemes were operated by charlatans, who conned Louie out of thousands of dollars. These failures sank Louie deeper into despair.
At home, Louie was tense and quick-tempered. In public, he was aggressive and humiliating. Cynthia’s sadness about the state of her marriage turned into anger and resentment, and she and Louie fought often. Louie became convinced that God was out to get him, and any mention of religion sent him over the edge.
In spring 1948, Cynthia announced she was pregnant. The news made Louie elated, but it also put more pressure on him to succeed, which made him more anxious. Toward the end of the pregnancy, Louie experienced a night terror in which the Bird was beating him with the buckle. He lunged for the Bird and began strangling him. A second later, Louie looked down and realized he was strangling his pregnant wife.
Louie knew he was floundering, but not even the birth of his daughter, Cissy, could bring him out of the darkness. And after Cynthia came home and found him shaking the baby, she prepared to file for divorce.
In late 1949, Billy Graham, a young unknown man at the time, came to Los Angeles and performed a miracle. He set up what would become a massive revival residency. In just a month, he went from having 2,000 attendants at his sermons to 10,000. Word spread around the city and made its way to Cynthia. She begged Louie to take her, but he refused, so Cynthia went by herself.
Cynthia and Louie were living separate lives in the same apartment. She was still planning on filing for a divorce, but after she attended Graham’s sermon, she came home and told Louie the divorce was off. She’d had a religious awakening, and she wanted Louie to come next time to experience it. After much persistence, Louie finally agreed to go.
That first night, Louie became angry when Graham asked the congregation how long it had been since they’d prayed. The words poked at a dormant memory fighting to get out, and Louie felt cornered. At the next sermon, which Cynthia again persuaded him to attend, Graham said something that changed everything: “God works miracles one after another…. God says, ‘If you suffer, I’ll give you the grace to go forward.” At those words, Louie’s mind woke up.
Louie saw the morning in the doldrums, when he was certain they’d been led there by divine intervention. He saw the wires entangling his body as the Green Hornet sank and waking to find them inexplicably fallen away. He saw the Japanese plane shooting at their rafts but not one of them hit. He saw the prison camps and all he’d endured. Then his mind landed on the memory scratching at the surface—praying in the raft and promising to serve God if he saved him.
At that moment, Louie felt rain falling from the sky as he hunkered down in the raft. The flashback stopped, and he was suddenly filled with light. When they returned home, Louie threw out every bottle of alcohol and vice he’d used during the last years of despair. That night, he didn’t dream of the Bird. He would never have a flashback or dream of the Bird again.
Louie was a new man with a new purpose. When he thought of his past now, he only thought of the graciousness of God to help him survive. He became a Christan speaker, adding his awakening to his previous story. He saved up enough money to buy a small house for his family. But there was a question he still needed an answer to, and he had to go to Japan to get it.
A year after the night at Graham’s sermon, Louie stood in front of Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, where his tormentors were being held. He looked over a room full of guards and took in the faces of Jimmie, the Quack, and others he recognized. The person he didn’t see was the Bird.
When Louie was told about the Bird’s suicide, he thought he would feel cheated or relieved. But all Louie felt was sadness. In that moment, he saw the Bird not as a villain, but as a man who’d gone astray down a bad path and never found his way back. The last thing Louie expected to feel was forgiveness, but it was all he could feel. Before he left the prison, Louie hugged his former captors, tears streaming down his face. He was free of all the shame, anger, and fear. Louie could finally leave the war behind.
When Louie returned from Japan, he bought an abandoned campsite and created the Victory Boys Camp, a nonprofit wilderness retreat for wayward boys. Louie took troubled youth into the mountains that had helped him find peace after the war. They rode horses, camped, rappelled, and learned survival skills. Louie talked to them about future jobs, and in the evenings, he told his story of survival and redemption around a campfire.
Louie never lost his charm, good nature, and zeal for life. His body remained strong, and in his 60s, he still hiked the mountain weekly and could clock a mile in under six minutes. In his 70s, he started skateboarding. At 85, he went on an expedition to find the bodies of the nine marines at Kwajalein, but it was unsuccessful. At 90, he was still skiing and climbing trees.
Louie received many awards in his life, and his parents’ home was made a historic landmark. He carried the torch at five different Olympics, including one in Japan. Despite being declared dead in his 20s, Louie outlived his siblings and wife, the last of whom died in 2008.
When the order to apprehend war criminals was lifted in 1952, Watanabe resurfaced. He was not dead. His mother had lied. As a free man, Watanabe moved to Tokyo, married, had two children, and became a successful businessman, making well into the millions of dollars. He saw himself as a victim of the war and the lifted order as proof of his innocence.
In 1995, at the age of 77, Watanabe opened up to a London reporter about his past. He told the reporter he wanted to apologize to the POWs. He said he’d been acting under direct orders and had just been trying to promote discipline. He denied using anything but his fists to punish them.
In 1997, a producer from CBS called Watanabe about a profile he was doing on Louie Zamperini surrounding the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, in which Louie would be carrying the torch. Watanabe agreed to meet with him, but after the producer grilled him about his treatment of Louie, Watanabe became defensive. Still, when the producer asked if he would meet with Louie, Watanabe agreed.
Across the ocean, the CBS producer told Louie the Bird was alive. Louie almost fell off his chair and said he wanted to see him without hesitation. Before his trip to Japan, Louie wrote the Bird a letter detailing his struggles after the war and his rebirth thanks to Billy Graham. Louie told the Bird he forgave him and hoped the Bird could find Christ. Louie took the letter with him on the day the two were to meet, but in the end, Watanabe refused to come. Whether or not Louie’s letter ever reached him is unclear. In 2003, Watanabe died.
Shortly after the failed meeting, Louie stood with the Olympic torch in his hand. He started to jog, holding the torch high as he passed Naoetsu. Where once prison cells stood, now a peace park dedicated to the memories of the POWs and guards stood. Louie ran, smiling and waving to the line of Japanese faces smiling back.
The Fate of the Others
Pete Zamperini eventually got married and had three children. He coached football at Torrance High, then transferred to a different school and coached track and field. In thirty years as the head track coach, he only had one losing season. When he retired, 800 people came to celebrate him.
Pete continued to train the neighborhood children well into his 90s, holding races down the sidewalks. The saga of his brother’s life never left him, and he had a fear of the ocean. He remained a champion of Louie’s for the rest of his life and could still recite all of Louie’s race times to the second. He died in 2008 of cancer.
Phil and Cecy lived in Indiana and worked as teachers at a local junior high. They had two children and led a happy life. Phil rarely spoke of the war, and other than the scar from the crash on his head, the only signs of his experiences were in small quirks. He had trouble eating poultry, ate food straight out of cans, and refused to go near a plane. He also never went back to Japan.
As an older man, Phil was known for sitting in silence for long periods of time. In the 1990s, illness took over, and he spent his remaining days in an assisted living complex. When the staff learned who he was, they threw an event in his honor. It was the first event that honored him for his journey, not Louie’s. For the first time since returning home, Phil shared his story.
William Harris regained his mental faculties after the war. He returned home, married, and had two children. He remained active duty, rising to the position of lieutenant colonel in the Marines. He and Louie stayed in touch through letters, and they both promised to try to meet again in the future. But in 1950, William was sent to the Korean war to command a battalion. Before he left, he told his wife he would not allow himself to be captured if things went bad.
William led a diminished troop into a battle with a much larger Chinese force to allow an American convoy to escape. They lost men, but the battle was successful. In the morning, no one could find him. They searched for hours and came up with nothing. William was never seen again, and he was honored with the Navy Cross for his heroics during that battle.
The story of Louie Zamperini’s struggles and triumphs speaks to the strength of the human soul and serves as a lesson to never give up.
What do you believe is required for a person to survive immense hardship?
It what ways have you managed hardship in your life? What helped you get through the hard times?
Do you have a different outlook on life than you did before you read the summary? How has Louie’s story affected you?
If you could use one word to describe Louie Zamperini, what would it be and why?