by Laura Hillenbrand, 2010 (she wrote Seabiscuit)
“A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”
Louis Zamperini, from Torrance, CA, grows from a delinquent to an Olympic runner. Then a bombardier for the Army Air Force in WWII. He flies in B-24 bombers and they participate in the bombing of Nauru in the Pacific. On the way back to Funafuti, in their beloved B-24 Superman, they are shot full of 594 bullet holes from 4 or 5 zeroes, but they make it back. Then the island of Funafuti is bombed by the Japanese one night later. That scared them more than the Nauru ordeal. Then a “despised” lieutenant makes them fly the Green Hornet, a bad junk plane, to search the Pacific for a downed B-24 flown by Clarence Corpening. The Green Hornet’s engine number 1 dies and they end up crashing in the Pacific Ocean. Only Louis, Phil, and Mac survive the crash. They drift on rafts in the Pacific longer than anyone else known (47 days). Mac dies (after many, many days) – he lost all hope. Phil and Louie – good friends – quiz each other. They catch rainwater, albatrosses, and fish. They battle sharks, including a great white. They survive a strafing attack by a Japanese plane. They end up in the doldrums where Louie and Phil share a beautiful site: “It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men in absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.
“For awhile they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.
“As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before…Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.”
Then this experience: “On the fortieth day, Louie was lying beside Phil under the canopy when he abruptly sat up. He could hear singing. He kept listening; it sounded like a choir. He nudged Phil and asked him if he heard anything. Phil said no. Louis slid the canopy off and squinted into the daylight. The ocean was a featureless flatness. He looked up.
“Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard.”
They finally drift to the Marshall Islands, are taken prisoners by the Japanese-first on Kwajalein and then to Japan. First in Ofuna, then Omori, where he meets the Bird–a sadistic prison guard who constantly beats and harasses Louie. His real name is Mutsuhiro Watanabe. Then to Naoetsu – harassed by the Bird there also. War ends after 2 A-bombs dropped. Prisoners set free – taken to Okinawa, then home.
Louie’s nightmares and alcoholism ensue once he’s home. He marries Cynthia and they have a baby girl. Cynthia decides to divorce him when he is found shaking their baby girl – also named Cynthia.
Cynthia comes back to L.A., goes to Billy Graham revival, is converted, convinces Louie to go. He finally does, and storms out the first night. She convinces him to go again. Billy Graham preaches that night on how God created this beautiful universe yet numbers the very hairs on our heads. “‘God works miracles one after another…if you suffer, I’ll give you the grace to go forward.'”
“Louie found himself thinking of the moment at which he had woken in the sinking hull of Green Hornet, the wires that had trapped him a moment earlier now, inexplicably, gone. And he remembered the Japanese bomber swooping over the rafts, riddling them with bullets, and yet not a single bullet had struck him, Phil, or Mac. He had fallen into unbearably cruel worlds, and yet he had borne them…
“Louie pushed passed the congregants in his row, charging for the exit…
“As he reached the aisle, he stopped. Cynthia, the rows of bowed heads, the sawdust underfoot, the tent around him, all disappeared. A memory long beaten back, the memory from which he had run the night before, was upon him.
“Louie was on the raft. There was gentle Phil crumpled up before him, Mac’s breathing skeleton, endless ocean stretching away in every direction, the sun lying over them, the cunning bodies of the sharks, waiting, circling. He was a body on a raft, dying of thirst. He felt words whisper from his swollen lips. It was a promise thrown at heaven, a promise he had not kept, a promise he had allowed himself to forget until just this instant: If you will save me, I will serve you forever…
“It was the last flashback he would ever have…”
Louie threw out all his cigarettes, alcohol, and girlie magazines that night.
“In the morning, he woke feeling cleansed. For the first time in five years, the Bird hadn’t come into his dreams. The Bird would never come again.”
He took his Bible, went to a park, sat under a tree and began reading.
“Louie felt profound peace…In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation.”
For the rest of his long life, Louie remained joyful. He goes back to Japan and meets some of the prison guards who are now in prison for their war crimes. He was told that Watanabe (the Bird) had committed suicide (not true). Louie felt compassion for him.
“At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless, and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.”
He goes on to open “Victory Boys Camp.” He is honored to run the Olympic torch at 5 different games. Lomita Air Field is renamed Zamperini Field. “A plaza at USC was named after him, as was the stadium at Torrance High.”
In his seventies, he learned skateboarding.
Laura Hillenbrand’s Acknowledgements, last paragraph, May 2010:
“Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional and physical scars that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. I come away from this book with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they sacrificed, for the good of humanity. It is to them that this book is dedicated.”