War Baggage

Louis Zamperini was born in 1917 to Italian immigrants. He grew up in Torrance, California, where he was frequently in trouble with the law. While his young life was troubled, when he reached his teen years, he channeled his energy into athletics and became a champion distance runner. This was a turnaround point for Zamperini. At age 19, Zamperini competed for the United States at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. While he didn’t finish first, instead coming in 8th in the 5,000-meter race, his fast final lap caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who later asked to shake Zamperini’s hand. (Of course, that was prior to all of the atrocities Hitler was responsible for. Either way this was not a hand shake I would have been proud of.) After the Olympics, he was a record-setting standout on the University of Southern California’s track team.

With the onset of World War II, and the entrance of the United States into it, came Zamperini’s enlistment in the fall of 1941, into the US Army Air Corps. He was eventually stationed in Hawaii. Zamperini was serving as the bombardier on a B-24 in May 1943. They were searching for a missing plane when his own aircraft developed mechanical problems and went down in the Pacific. On May 27, 1943, the B-24 carrying US airman Louis Zamperini crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Crashes into the ocean are often fatal, and for most of the men onboard this was the case. Only three of the eleven men onboard survived…26-year-old Zamperini, along with the pilot, and the tail gunner, and with their survival began a long ordeal. Fighting for their lives, the three men stayed alive in a small raft by drinking rainwater and eating the occasional seabirds and fish they were able to catch…raw, of course. If that wasn’t awful enough, they also faced strafing from Japanese bombers and of course, the ever-present threat of shark attacks. A month into their ordeal, Francis McNamara, the tail gunner, quietly passed away.

Finally, on their 47th day in the raft, Zamperini and fellow survivor Russell Allen Phillips were picked up by Japanese sailors, after drifting some 2,000 miles since the crash. While they were no longer in danger of starvation, strafing, or shark attacks, they were not “out of the woods” yet. The Japanese sailors took them captive, and for more than two years, the two men were held in a series of prison camps, where they were repeatedly beaten and starved. As an ex-Olympian, Zamperini was considered a propaganda tool by the Japanese and saved from execution. Nevertheless, he was also singled out for particularly vicious forms of torture. The defiant American managed to survive and was finally released after the war ended in 1945.

Like most soldiers who came home from wars, Zamperini carried war baggage home with him. Today we would call it PTSD. Once he got home to California, Zamperini drank heavily and was haunted by his experiences in captivity. Finally, a miracle happened to him. After listening to evangelist Billy Graham, Zamperini became a Christian in 1949. He went on to become an inspirational speaker, forgive his captors, and publish an autobiography called Devil at my Heels. Author Laura Hillenbrand heard of his story and wrote a book about his life called Unbroken. Zamperini died of pneumonia on July 2, 2014, in Los Angeles. He was 97.