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

known among the Washington elite, mixing with legislators at building cocktail parties, playing golf at the Army Navy Country Club, socializing with police officers and State Department officials, and volunteering to serve as chauffeur after parties. Just whose side he was on is unclear; at a cocktail party, he gave a congressman sensitive information on Japanese aircraft manufacturing.
    The letter to the FBI set off alarm bells. Hoover, concerned enough to plan on informing the secretary of state, ordered an immediate investigation of Sasaki.
    ——

    Not long after sunrise on a Sunday in December, a pilot guided a small plane over the Pacific. Below him, the dark sea gave way to a strand of white: waves slapping the northern tip of Oahu Island. The plane flew into a brilliant Hawaiian morning.
    Oahu was beginning to stir. At Hickam Field, soldiers were washing a car. On Hula Lane, a family was dressing for Mass. At the officers’ club at Wheeler Field, men were leaving a poker game. In a barracks, two men were in the midst of a pillow fight. At Ewa Mooring Mast Field, a technical sergeant was peering through the lens of a camera athis three-year-old son. Hardly anyone had made it to the mess halls yet. Quite a few were still sleeping in their bunks in the warships, gently swaying in the harbor. Aboard the USS
Arizona
, an officer was about to suit up to play in the United States Fleet championship baseball game. On deck, men were assembling to raise flags as a band played the national anthem, a Sunday morning tradition.
    Far above them, the pilot counted eight battleships, the Pacific Fleet’s full complement. There was a faint sheet of fog settled low to the ground.
    The pilot’s name was Mitsuo Fuchida. He rolled back the canopy on his plane and sent a flare skidding green across the sky, then ordered his radioman to tap out a battle cry. Behind Fuchida, 180 Japanese planes peeled away and dove for Oahu. * On the deck of the
Arizona
, the men looked up.
    In the barracks, one of the men in the pillow fight suddenly fell to the floor. He was dead, a three-inch hole blown through his neck. His friend ran to a window and saw a building heave upward and crumble down. A dive-bomber had crashed straight into it. There were red circles on its wings.
    ——

    Pete Zamperini was at a friend’s house that morning, playing a few hands of high-low-jack before heading out for a round of golf. Behind him, the sizzle of waffles on a griddle competed with the chirp of a radio. An urgent voice interrupted the broadcast. The players put down their cards.
    In Texas, Louie was in a theater, on a weekend pass. The theater was thick with servicemen, taking breaks from the endless drilling that was the life of the peacetime soldier. Midway through the showing, the screen went blank, light flooded the theater, and a man hurried onto the stage.
Is there a fire?
Louie wondered.
    All servicemen must return to their bases immediately, the man said. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.
    Louie would long remember sitting there with his eyes wide, his mind floundering. America was at war. He grabbed his hat and ran from the building.
    B-24 LIBERATOR

    * Because indoor tracks are shorter than outdoor ones, forcing runners to make more turns to cover the same distance, indoor records are generally slower. In 1940, the outdoor mile world record was one second faster than the indoor record.
* Höckert’s teammate Lauri Lehtinen, the 1932 5,000-meter Olympic champion, gave his gold medal to another Finnish soldier in Höckert’s honor.
* Many other great runners also enlisted. When Norman Bright tried to sign up, he was rejected because of his alarmingly slow pulse, a consequence of his extreme fitness. He solved the problem by running three miles, straight into another enlistment office. Cunningham tried to join the navy, but recruiters, seeing his grotesquely scarred legs, assumed that he was too crippled to serve. When someone came in and mentioned his name, they realized who he was and signed him in.
* One hundred and eighty-three planes were launched in this first of two waves, but two were lost on takeoff.



Six
The Flying Coffin

    A S JAPANESE PLANES DOVE OVER OAHU, MORE THAN TWO thousand miles to the west, a few marines were sitting in a mess tent on Wake Atoll, having breakfast. Extremely small, lacking its own water supply, Wake would have been a useless atoll but for one enormous attribute: It lay far out in the Pacific, making it a