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

weighed himself. He had sweated off three pounds. He looked in a mirror and saw a ghostly image looking back at him.
    Across the room, Norman Bright was slumped on a bench with one ankle propped over the other knee, staring at his foot. It, like the other one, was burned so badly that the skin had detached from the sole. He had finished fifth, two places short of the Olympic team. *
    By the day’s end, Louie had received some 125telegrams. TORRANCE HAS GONE NUTS , read one. VILLAGE HAS GONE SCREWEY , read another. There was even one from the Torrance Police Department, which must have been relieved that someone else was chasing Louie.
    That night, Louie pored over the evening papers, which showed photos of the finish of his race. In some, he seemed to be tied with Lash; in others, he seemed to be in front. On the track, he’d felt sure that he had won. The first three would go to the Olympics, but Louie felt cheated nonetheless.
    As Louie studied the papers, the judges were reviewing photographs and a film of the 5,000. Later, Louie sent home a telegram with the news: JUDGES CALLED IT A TIE. LEAVE NOON WEDNESDAY FOR BERLIN. WILL RUN HARDER IN BERLIN .
    When Sylvia returned from work the next day, the house was packed with well-wishers and newsmen. Louie’s twelve-year-old sister, Virginia, clutched one of Louie’s trophies and told reporters of her plans to be the next great Zamperini runner. Anthony headed off to the Kiwanis club, where he and Louie’s Boy Scout master would drink toasts to Louie until four in the morning. Pete walked around town to back slaps and congratulations. “Am I ever happy,” he wrote to Louie. “I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.”
    Louie Zamperini was on his way to Germany to compete in the Olympics in an event that he had only contested four times. He was theyoungest distance runner to ever make the team.
    * Louie’s time was called a “world interscholastic” record, but this was a misnomer. There were no official world high school records. Later sources would list the time as 4:21.2, but all sources from 1934 list it as 4:21.3. Because different organizations had different standards for record verification, there is some confusion about whose record Louie broke, but according to newspapers at the time, the previous recordholder was Ed Shields, who ran 4:23.6 in 1916. In 1925, Chesley Unruh was timed in 4:20.5, but this wasn’t officially verified. Cunningham was also credited with the record, but his time, 4:24.7 run in 1930, was far slower than those of Unruh and Shields. Louie’s mark stood until Bob Seaman broke it in 1953.
* Apparently because of his burns, Cunningham didn’t start high school until he was eighteen.
* Bright wouldn’t have another shot at the Olympics, but he would run for the rest of his life, setting masters records in his old age. Eventually he went blind, but he kept right on running, holding the end of a rope while a guide held the other. “The only problem was that most guides couldn’t run as fast as my brother, even when he was in his late seventies,” wrote his sister Georgie Bright Kunkel. “In his eighties his grandnephews would walk with him around his care center as he timed the walk on his stopwatch.”

Four
Plundering Germany

    T HE LUXURY STEAMER
MANHATTAN
, BEARING THE 1936 U.S. Olympic team to Germany, was barely past the Statue of Liberty before Louie beganstealing things. In his defense, he wasn’t the one who started it. Mindful of being a teenaged upstart in the company of such seasoned track deities as Jesse Owens and Glenn Cunningham, Louie curbed his coltish impulses and began growing amustache. But he soon noticed that practically everyone on board was “souvenir collecting,” pocketing towels, ashtrays, and anything else they could easily lift.“They had nothing on me,” he said later. “I [was] Phi Beta Kappa in taking things.” The mustache was abandoned. As the voyage went on, Louie and the other lightfingers quietly denuded the
Manhattan
.
    Everyone was fighting for training space. Gymnasts set up their apparatuses, but with the ship swaying, they kept getting bucked off. Basketball players did passing drills on deck, but the wind kept jettisoning the balls into the Atlantic. Fencers lurched all over the ship. The water athletes discovered that the salt water in the ship’s tiny pool sloshed back and forth vehemently, two feet deep one moment, seven feet the