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

gone home in March.
    Someone brought Louie the August 15 issue of the
Minneapolis Star-Journal
. Near the back was an article entitled “Lest We Forget,” discussing athletes who had died in the war. 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. There on the page with them, Louie saw his own picture and the words “great miler … killed in action in the South Pacific.”
    The Okinawa mess hall was kept open around the clock for the POWs, who couldn’t stop eating. Louie headed straight for it, but was stopped at the door. Because the Japanese had never registered him with the Red Cross, his name wasn’t on the roster. As far as the mess was concerned, Louie wasn’t a POW. He encountered the same problem when trying to get a new uniform to replace the pants and shirt that he had worn every day since May 27, 1943. Until the snafu was straightened out, he had to subsist on candy bars from Red Cross nurses.
    Soon after Louie’s arrival, he was sent to a hospital to be examined. Like most POWs, in gorging day and night, he had gained weight extremely rapidly; he now weighed 143 pounds, just seventeen pounds under his weight at the time of the crash. But thanks to dramatic water retention, it was a doughy, moon-faced, muscleless weight. He still had volatile dysentery and was as weak as a blade of grass. He was only twenty-eight, but his body, within and without, was etched with the trauma of twenty-seven months of abuse and deprivation. The physicians, who knew what Louie had once been, sat him down to have a solemn talk. After Louie left the doctors, a reporter asked him about his running career.

    Louie in Okinawa. On his right hand is the USC class ring that caught in the wreckage of his plane as it sank.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    “It’s finished,” he said, his voice sharp. “I’ll never run again.”
    ——

    The Zamperinis were on edge. Since Louie’s crash, his only message to make it to America had been his radio broadcast ten months earlier. The letters that he had written after the Bird had left Omori had not arrived. Other than the War Department’s December confirmation that Louie was a POW, no further word from or about him had come. The papers were full of stories about the murder of POWs, and families couldn’t rest easy. The Zamperinis contacted the War Department, but the department had nothing to tell. Sylvia kept writing to Louie, telling him of all they would do when he came home. “Darling, we will take the best of care for you,” she wrote. “You shall be ‘King Toots,’—anything your heart desires—(yes, even red heads and all).” But she, like the rest of the family, was scared. Pete, living in his officer’s quarters in San Diego, kept calling home to see if news had come. The answer was always no.
    On the morning of September 9, Pete was startled awake by a hand on his shoulder, shaking him vigorously. He opened his eyes to see one of his friends bending over him with a huge smile. Trumbull’s story had appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
. The headline said it all: ZAMPERINI COMES BACK FROM DEAD .
    In a moment, Pete was on his feet, throwing on his clothes. He bolted for a telephone and dialed his parents’ number. Sylvia picked up. Pete asked if she had heard the news.
    “Did you hear the news?” she repeated back to him. “Did I! Wow!” Pete asked to speak to his mother, but she was too overcome to talk.
    Louise and Virginia rushed to church to give thanks, then raced home to prepare the house. As she stood in Louie’s room, dusting his running trophies, Louise blinked away tears, singing out, “He’s on the way home. He’s on the way home.”
    “From now on,” she said, “September 9 is going to be Mother’s Day to me, because that’s the day I learned for sure my boy was coming home to stay.”
    “What do you think, Pop?” someone asked Louie’s father.
    “Those Japs couldn’t break him,” Anthony said. “My boy’s pretty tough, you know.”
    ——

    Liberation was a long time coming for Phil and Fred at Rokuroshi. After the August 22 announcement of the war’s end, the POWs sat there, waiting for someone to come get them. They got hold of a radio, and on it they heard chatter from men liberating other camps, but no one came