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

had no car, so he borrowed one from a friend. Then, as he had promised in a letter so long ago, he ran away with Cecy to a place where no one would find them.

    Russell Allen Phillips arrives at his mother’s house. On the back of this photo, someone wrote, “Home!”
Courtesy of Karen Loomis

    ——

    Pete was so anxious to see Louie that he could hardly bear it. The fighting had ended in mid-August, it was now October, and still Louie was hospital-hopping far from home. Then Pete learned that Louie was finally stateside, transferred from Hawaii to San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital. As soon as he got the news, Pete went AWOL. He bummed a ride to San Francisco on a navy plane, hitched his way toLetterman, and walked in. At the front desk, he called Louie’s room. A minute later, Louie bounded into the lobby.
    Each felt startled by the sight of the other. Pete had expected Louie to be emaciated and was surprised to find him looking almost portly. Louie was disturbed to see how the years of worry had depleted his brother. Pete was gaunt, and he’d gone largely bald. The brothers fell together, eyes shining.
    Pete and Louie spent several days together in San Francisco while doctors finally cured Louie of his dysentery. After reading the Trumbull article, Pete had worried that Louie might be severely traumatized, but as the two laughed and kidded each other, his fears faded. Louie was as upbeat and garrulous as ever. Once, when a group of reporters shuffled in to interview Louie, they crowded around Pete, assuming that of the two men, this haggard one had to be the POW.
    On a drizzling October day, the army sent a banged-up B-25 to San Francisco to bring Louie home. Pete, still AWOL, went aboard with his brother. The plane lifted off and rose over the clouds into a shining blue morning. Scared to death of flying, Pete tried to distract himself from the plane’s rattles and groans by staring out over a carpet of bright clouds, the upside of the rainstorm. He felt as if he could step from the plane and walk on them.
    Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their mother and father, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself around her.
    “
Cara mamma mia,
” he whispered. It was a long time before they let go.

    Louie’s homecoming, Long Beach Airport. Foreground, left to right: Virginia, Sylvia, Louise, and Louie.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    * One POW’s worst nightmare came true. Upon liberation, he was told by a reporter that his wife, believing him dead, had just married his uncle. When she learned that her first husband was alive, the woman immediately had her new marriage annulled and got the Associated Press to deliver a message to her lost husband: “I love only you, Gene. Please forgive me.”
* Louie was luckier than he knew. Another transport crashed on takeoff, in part because several Dutch POWs had overloaded the plane by packing aboard a large cache of GI shoes that they intended to sell back home. Everyone on the plane died. Another POW transport was lost over the ocean.



Thirty-four
The Shimmering Girl

    O N AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON, LOUIE STEPPED OUT OF AN army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years.
    “This, this little home,” he said, “was worth all of it.”
    As his parents and siblings filed into the house, Louie paused, overcome by a strange uneasiness. He had to push himself to walk up the steps.
    The house was done up top to bottom for hishomecoming. The surface of the dining room table was a traffic jam of heaping dishes. Three years’ worth of Christmas and birthday presents sat ready for opening. There was a cake with
Welcome Home Louie
inscribed in the icing. In the garage sat Louie’s beige Plymouth convertible, just as he had left it.
    The family ringed around Louie, babbling, eager to look at him and touch him. Anthony and Louise smiled, but there was a cast to their eyes, a tension that had never been there before. What Louie didn’t see was the rash on his mother’s hands. As soon as Louise had learned that her son was coming home, the rash had vanished. Nothing, not even a scar, remained. She would never tell Louie about it.
    After dessert, the family sat and talked. They spoke easily, as they always had. No one asked about prison camp. Louie