A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Because my family had a recent discussion about the greatest survival stories out there, and because I had also recently discovered the Libby app on my phone, I felt like two storms collided for me when I came across Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken available on audio for free on my phone. It far exceeded my expectations, and I couldn’t wait to jump in the car or the shower just so I can catch another snippet of this amazing saga.
But I almost never read it.
Now I’m generally a well-read guy and a moderate history buff, yet I had never heard the name of Louis Zamperini before picking up this book. Instead, the name I had heard plenty of was Angelina Jolie, an actress of whom I had definitely never been a fan. I can’t even recall the movies I’d seen her in a decade or more ago (something with Wynona Ryder—or maybe she was on the cover of every other magazine as that month’s bad girl—Oh, or maybe it was the whole Branjelina thing…please). Suffice it to say, I was never a fan, so when the Unbroken film came out and it was heralded to be something akin to Angelina Jolie’s own brainchild, I was immediately turned off. I never looked into it.
Fast forward a decade or so, and I now can’t wait to gain access to the film somehow! If this is what grown-up Jolie’s taste in books and stories looks like, sign me up for more!
The story of Louis Zamperini is a literal epic. The child of immigrants growing up as a tough guy on the streets finds his niche on the track and gains local, state, and national attention for being pretty much the fastest man in the country. He’s set for the Olympics. He’s set to be the greatest runner in the world. Virtually everyone knows his name.
And then Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, and the world is no longer the same. America enters the war, Zamperini joins a bombing squadron, and after a dangerous bit of training, he soon finds himself often in the air, flying regular runs over the Pacific.
One fateful day while his crew is out on a search-and-rescue run, an engine fails and the plane crashes into the sea. Only Louis and two other men survive, but not for long. Spending weeks on the open sea with sharks, starvation, and thirst threatening to kill them each day, one man succumbs to the elements and dies, and the remaining two continue their float. Zamperini senses great clarity out there beneath the stars and even promises God that, if He’ll just save him, he’ll serve Him forever.
When the men are finally spotted by a Japanese ship, they are taken aboard and eventually tossed into one of the worst POW holding compounds of the war. Only by God’s grace did they ever leave those first cells alive. Moved from camp to camp over the ensuing months, the men are eventually separated.
No one back home knows whether they’re dead or alive. The Zamperini family refuses to believe their son’s dead, despite the military’s eventual declaration that he’s lost and assumed KIA. Louis makes due and makes friends in the Japanese internment camp. At one point, Japan elects to use him as a propaganda piece, and he’s able to get the news of his survival out over the airwaves. Yet life in the camp only worsens, especially under the evil care of The Bird, a war-criminal guard who took sadistic pleasure in beating Louis Zamperini especially.
Every. Single Day.
Much of the story takes place in these interment camps, and we readers today cannot truly fathom through what horrors our POWs went just 75 years ago, and yet these are facts. This is history. Human history. Our history. History which can be, no, is being repeated at this very moment in pockets of our world.
Zamperini survives the war—no spoiler there, right?—but the book doesn’t end there. In fact, according to my count, a full 20% still remains! Zamperini returns home, marries, and is heralded as one of the great come-back heroes of the Greatest Generation. And yet he can’t handle it. He can’t handle all the speaking engagements, all the fancy balls where he’s supposed to share his ordeals and victories to dressed-up men and women as if everything’s now over and life’s to go on. Zamperini turns to drink to mellow the pain and memories, but the alcohol is no cure. Flashbacks come. The Bird haunts his dreams. He becomes a monster himself, still tied to his captors by that precious tether of revenge—he must kill The Bird!
Zamperini lives for this thought, despite the fact that The Bird has been long assumed dead. He’s not, and something inside Louis tells him this is so. One week, the Billy Graham Crusade comes to Los Angeles, and his wife begs him to go. He attends one night and storms out in a huff. She convinces him to attend a second, and it’s there that he meets the same God he had met so long ago on that dingy in the Pacific. With perfect clarity, he walks the aisle and gives his life to Christ! (I wonder: Was that part in the movie?)
From this point on, Louis quits his drinking and dedicates his life to forgiveness, even going so far as a flight to Japan where he faces and forgives his former captors. He longs to meet The Bird again and to share with him the forgiveness of Jesus, but he never gets a chance. Instead, he is only able to send him an incredible letter, which author Hillenbrand records for us. It’s a moving scene that’s a perfect capstone to the entire story, a thought-provoking instant that will stick with me for some time to come.
I can’t rave about this book enough. It’s skyrocketing into my list of Top 5 Survival Books, yet I just don’t know whose spot it’s taking. I don’t know why this gives me a new respect for Angelina Jolie, but it does. I can’t wait to find the film, though I know for a fact before even watching it….the book is way better.
©2021 E.T.