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

his Japanese homeland and was going to Torrance to give lectures to locals of Japanese ancestry, encouraging them to send money and foil from cigarette packs and gum wrappers to Japan to help the poor. Louie admiredhis friend for his efforts, but found it odd that he would travel to Torrance every day, given how few Japanese lived there.
    Jimmie Sasaki wasn’t what he seemed. He had never attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. His friends thought him about thirty; he was in fact nearly forty. He had a wife and two daughters, though neither Louie nor his friends knew that they existed. Though he spent a lot of time on campus and led everyone to believe that he was a student, he was not. He had graduated from USC some ten years earlier, with a B.A. in political science. Neither Louie nor anyone else knew that Jimmie’s attempts to pass as a student were apparently an elaborate ruse.
    ——

    On USC’s track team, Louie was a juggernaut. Focused on winning in Tokyo in 1940, he smashed record after record at multiple distances and routinely buried his competition by giant margins, once winning a race by one hundred yards. By the spring of 1938, he’d whittled his mile time down to 4:13.7, some seven seconds off the world record, which now stood at 4:06.4.His coach predicted that Louie would take that record down. The only runner who could beat him, the coach said, was Seabiscuit.
    One afternoon in 1938, Glenn Cunningham stood in the Los Angeles Coliseum locker room, talking with reporters after winning a race. “There’s the next mile champion,” he said, leveling his eyes across the room. “When he concentrates on this distance, he’ll be unbeatable.” The reporters turned to see who Cunningham was looking at. It was Louie, blushing to the roots of his hair.
    In the 1930s, track experts were beginning to toss around the idea of a four-minute mile. Most observers, including Cunningham, had long believed that it couldn’t be done. In 1935, when Cunningham’s record of 4:06.7 reigned, science weighed in. Studying data on human structural limits compiled by Finnish mathematicians, famed track coach Brutus Hamilton penned an article for
Amateur Athlete
magazine stating that a four-minute mile was impossible. The fastest a human could run a mile, he wrote, was 4:01.6.
    Pete disagreed. Since the Olympics, he’d been certain that Louie had a four-minute mile in him. Louie had always shaken this off, but in the spring of ’38, he reconsidered. His coach had forbidden him to run hills on the mistaken but common belief that it would damage his heart, but Louie didn’t buy the warnings. Every night that May, he climbed the coliseum fence, dropped into the stadium, and ran thestairs until his legs went numb. By June, his body was humming, capable of speed and stamina beyond anything he’d ever known. He began to think that Pete was right, and he wasn’t alone. Running pundits, including Olympic champion sprinter Charlie Paddock, published articles stating that Louie could be thefirst four-minute man. Cunningham, too, had changed his mind. He thought that four minutes might be within Louie’s reach. Zamperini, Cunningham told a reporter, was more likely to crack four minutes than he was.
    In June 1938, Louie arrived at the NCAA Championships in Minneapolis, gunning for four minutes. Spilling over with eagerness, he babbled to other athletes about his new training regimen, his race strategy, and how fast he might go. Word spread that Louie was primed for a superlative performance. On the night before the race, a coach from Notre Dame knocked on Louie’s hotel room door, a grave expression on his face. He told Louie that some of his rival coaches were ordering their runners to sharpen their spikes and slash him. Louie dismissed the warning, certain that no one would do such a thing deliberately.
    He was wrong. Halfway through the race, just as Louie was about to move for the lead, several runners shouldered around him, boxing him in. Louie tried repeatedly to break loose, but he couldn’t get around the other men. Suddenly, the man beside him swerved in and stomped on his foot, impaling Louie’s toe with his spike. A moment later, the man ahead began kicking backward, cutting both of Louie’s shins. A third man elbowed Louie’s chest so hard that he cracked Louie’s rib. The crowd gasped.
    Bleeding and in pain, Louie was trapped. For a lap and a half, he ran in the cluster of men, unable to get free, restraining