Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

by Laura Hillenbrand

When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.

He felt as if he would faint, but it wasn’t from the exertion. It was from the realization of what he was.

As they walked in, Lubin saw a sign reading JUDEN VERBOTEN. The sign hadn’t been there during the Games. All over Berlin, such signs were reappearing, and the Nazis’ virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, nowhere to be seen during the Games, was back on newsstands. Lubin had won a gold medal in Berlin, but when he left, he felt only relief. Something terrible was coming.

On December 11, a vast force, including eleven destroyers and light cruisers, launched an invasion attempt. The little group of defenders shoved them back, sinking two destroyers and damaging nine other ships, shooting down two bombers, and forcing the Japanese to abort, their first loss of the war.

What neither Pillsbury nor any of the other airmen knew was that among the men under their bombers that night were the ninety-eight Americans who had been captured and enslaved.

The Japanese base had been gravely damaged—by one estimate, half of its personnel had been killed—and America had demonstrated the reach and power of its B-24s. And though the men didn’t know it, the American captives had all survived.

In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.

In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1

A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.

At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners.

In World War II, 52,173 AAF men were killed in combat.

He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down.

When the plane had hit the water and he’d been thrown into the gun mount, all of his ribs had broken.

What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?

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.

All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing. Louie dissolved into hard, racking weeping. He muffled his sobs so the guard wouldn’t hear him.

Louie always knew that he was in for it when he heard a guard arriving in a stomping fit—a consequence, he hoped, of an American victory.

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose.

“Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

In the last days of the journey, the skinny American and the fat Japanese bottle had a grand time together.

Through a gap in his blindfold, Louie’s first glimpse of Japan was the word CHEVROLET, stamped on a hubcap.

Louie soon learned a critical rule of conversation: Never use a guard’s real name. Guards who discovered that they were being discussed often delivered savage beatings, so the men invented nicknames for them. The sluggish, quiet camp commander was called the Mummy. Guard nicknames included Turdbird, Flange Face, the Weasel, Liver Lip, Fatty, and Termite. A particularly repugnant guard was known as Shithead.

When the men were ordered to bow toward the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito.

Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

Outside, a serviceman, climbing through the remains of a wooden structure, saw something in the wreckage and dug it out. It was a long splinter of wood. Etched along the slat, in capital letters, was the name LOUIS ZAMPERINI.

The raid had used B-25s flown, perilously, off an aircraft carrier, under command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.

Midway movie

Anyone caught escaping would be executed, and for every escapee, several captive officers would be shot. Louie, Tinker, and Harris suspended their plan.

Men harrowed by dysentery—“the benjo boogie”—swallowed lumps of coal or burnt sticks to slow the digestive waterfall. Many men weighed less than ninety pounds.

From the moment that Watanabe locked eyes with Louie Zamperini, an officer, a famous Olympian, and a man for whom defiance was second nature, no man obsessed him more.

The men referred to him by a host of nicknames, including the Animal, the Big Flag, Little Napoleon, and, most often, the Bird, a name chosen because it carried no negative connotation that could get the POWs beaten.

He’d look for the corporal through morning tenko, roll call, farting at the emperor, and forcing down rations.

As dangerous as these acts were, for the POWs, they were transformative. In risking their necks to sabotage their enemy, the men were no longer passive captives. They were soldiers again.

And in a place predicated on degradation, stealing from the enemy won back the men’s dignity.

The race was to be called the Louis S. Zamperini Memorial Mile. Out of respect for the family, the name was changed to the Louis S. Zamperini Invitational, but that did little to lift the spirits of those involved. Marty Glickman, who’d been on the 1936 Olympic team with Louie, watched the race with tears streaming down his face.

He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me.

In the skies over Japan that night, America was staging by far the biggest air raid, by tonnage, of World War II: 836 B-29s, bearing more than 6,100 tons of bombs, incendiaries, and mines.

At a quarter to three on the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 skipped off Runway Able on Tinian Island. At the yoke was Paul Tibbets, a veteran bomber pilot. The plane headed north, toward Japan. The mission was so secret that Tibbets carried cyanide capsules for all of the crewmen, to be used if they crashed and were captured.

It was the first that Louie had seen or heard of them in nearly two and a half years. He clutched his letters and hung on.

“The war has come to a point of cessation.” There was no reaction from the POWs. Some believed it, but kept silent for fear of reprisal. Others, suspecting a trick, did not.

No one who has not spent all but 16 days of this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see ‘Old Sammy’ buzzing around over the camp.”

Louie lay among them, swaddled in an American parachute that he had dragged in from the rice paddy.

“There’s just one thing left to say as we bunk down for the night,” he continued, “an [sic] that it’s wonderful to be Americans and free men, and it’s a might [sic] hard job even now to realize we’re free men.”

So the POWs settled in to wait, eating, smoking, resting, eating, celebrating, swimming, and eating more.

More than four hundred amateur, professional, and collegiate athletes had been killed, including nineteen pro football players, five American League baseball players, eleven pro golfers, and 1920 Olympic champion sprinter Charlie Paddock, whom Louie had known.

He had just completed the latest of many surreal liberation experiences, traveling to New York to fire the starting gun for Madison Square Garden’s Zamperini Invitational Mile, the race conceived to honor him when almost everyone thought he was dead.

The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.

All he had left was his alcohol and his resentment, the emotion that, Jean Améry would write, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past.”