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

across Europe, his Soviet allies had followed, and the continent had exploded into total war. Finland, which was set to host the summer Games, was reeling. Helsinki’s Olympic stadium was partially collapsed, toppled by Soviet bombs. Gunnar Höckert, who had beaten Louie and won gold for Finland in the 5,000 in Berlin, was dead, killed defending his homeland. * The Olympics had been canceled.
    ——

    Louie was unmoored. He became ill, first with food poisoning, then with pleurisy. His speed abandoned him, and he lost race after race. When USC’s spring semester ended, he collected his class ring and left campus. He was a few credits short of a degree, but he had all of 1941 to make them up. He took a job as a welder at the Lockheed Air Corporation and mourned his lost Olympics.
    As Louie worked through the summer of ’40, America slid toward war. In Europe, Hitler had driven the British and their allies into the sea at Dunkirk. In the Pacific, Japan was tearing through China and moving into Indochina. In an effort to stop Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt imposed ever-increasing embargoes on matériel, such as scrap metal and aviation fuel. In the coming months, he would declare an oil embargo, freeze Japanese assets in America, and finally declare a total trade embargo. Japan pushed on.
    Lockheed was on a war footing, punching out aircraft for the Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force. From the hangar where he worked, Louie could see P-38 fighters cruising overhead. Ever since his trip in the air as a boy, he’d been uneasy about planes, but watching the P-38s, he felt a pull. He was still feeling it in September when Congress enacted a draft bill. Those who enlisted prior to being drafted could choose their service branch. In early 1941, Louie joined the Army Air Corps. *
    Sent to the Hancock College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria, California, Louie learned that flying a plane was nothing like watching it from the ground. He was jittery and dogged by airsickness. He washed out of the air corps, signed papers that he didn’t bother to read, and got a job as a movie extra. He was working on the set of
They Died with
Their Boots On
, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, when a letter arrived. He’d been drafted.

    Louie in training.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    The induction date fell before the Flynn film would wrap, and Louie stood to earn a bonus if he stayed through the shoot. Just before his army physical, he ate a fistful ofcandy bars; thanks to the consequent soaring blood sugar, he failed the physical. Ordered to return a few days later to retake the test, he went back to the set and earned his bonus. Then, on September 29, he joined the army.
    When he finished basic training, he had an unhappy surprise. Because he hadn’t read his air corps washout papers, he had no idea that he’d agreed to rejoin the corps for future service. In November 1941, he arrived at Ellington Field, in Houston, Texas. The military was going to make him a bombardier.
    ——

    That fall, while Louie was on his way to becoming an airman, an urgent letter landed on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI.It had come from a brigadier general at the War Department, Military Intelligence Division. The letter said that a credible informant had warned military officials that a California man, believed to be working for an innocuous local Japanese organization, had in fact been an employee of the Japanese navy, on assignment to raise money for Japan’s war effort. Japanese naval superiors had recently transferred the man to Washington, D.C., the informant said, to continue acting under their orders. According to the informant, the man was known as “Mr. Sasaki.” It was Louie’s friend Jimmie.
    Though the surviving records of theinformant’s report contain no details of Sasaki’s alleged activities, according to notes made later by a captain of the Torrance police, Sasaki had been making visits to a field adjacent to a power station, just off of Torrance Boulevard. There, he had erected a powerful radio transmitter, which he had used to send information to the Japanese government. If the allegation was true, it would explain Sasaki’s mysterious trips to Torrance. Louie’s good friend may have been a spy.
    Sasaki had indeed moved to Washington, D.C., in the employ of the Japanese navy. He worked in the Japanese embassy and lived in an apartment building popular among congressmen. He made himself well