Unbroken (2010) Laura Hillenbrand

A good book makes you change your mind. I used to think the dropping of ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima was unnecessary. The American and their Allies had control of the skies. They were getting closer to mainland Japan. It was just a matter of time. But this isn’t a history book. This is an old-fashioned testament of the lost and found. Louis Zamperini’s mother was sixteen when she had her second son on January 26th 1917 (he had an elder brother Pete and two sisters soon followed). She spoke little English, fluent only in Italian. His father, Anthony, was eighteen and had been working as a coal miner, professional boxer and construction worker since he was fourteen. The family moved from New York to Torrance California (pop. 1800) because his father found work as a railway electrician.

Louis was the black sheep of the family and town. He was hard-wired for taking risks and hyperkinetic. Two-year-old Louie, for example, had pneumonia, a killer in those days, but he climbed out of his upstairs window descended onto the street and was chased down by a policeman with a crowd watching him making his getaway. He didn’t get any better and was threatened, beaten and promised he’d get shot by irate townsfolk. But Louis didn’t stop running.   

He followed his brother Pete and took up athletics. He was a God-gifted runner, the Torrance tornado, which put his town on the map. He represented the USA in the Olympic Games in Berlin. He didn’t win any medals, but Adolf Hitler shook his hand and he’d helluva time. The four-minute mile was thought outside the realms of possibility, but if anyone could do it Louis was pencilled in as that man. The Second World War brought an end to international athletic meetings. Life and death times were no longer a metaphorical way of speaking.

Louie got inducted in the air force. His job in the B24 bomber tagged ‘Superman’ was to drop bombs on the islands occupied by the Japanese. He had a new gizmo, a bomb-sighting device that was guarded when not in use. He was good at his job. In practice runs his crew scored the greatest success. But more aircraft were lost in training runs than brought down by the Japanese. Men and aircraft were expendable.  

They knew that to get lost at sea was a death sentence. Official figures in 1945 show that 13% were rescued.  Ironically, while searching for another crew in a dilapidated Green Hornet, they were also lost. This is the beginning of the story of hardship and the length and depth of human endurance. They were strafed by a Japanese planes, their raft sinking and sharks circling. Miraculously, no one died, although later one of his crew Mac succumbed to dehydration and malnutrition. Louie heard heavenly choirs (I’m with Dylan Thomas on this one and tend to avoid such things). Sharks tried jumping on the raft and dragging them into the sea. They found land after one of the longest recorded cases on survival on open sea in an ill-equipped life raft. But it was an island occupied by the Japanese.  

Sharks or the Japanese? Louie looked back fondly at his time at sea.  In the rape of Nanking in 1937, for example, the Japanese military followed an edict that all prisoners of war were to be executed. 90 000 soldiers surrendered believing they were to interned. They were beheaded, machine-gunned, bayoneted, burned and had dogs set on them. Japanese soldiers engaged in killing contests. They turned on the half million civilians raping tens of thousands, mauling and crucifying. Estimates of the death toll were between 200 000 and 430 000 Chinese killed. This was a militaristic society based on violence and racial purity.

Prison guards were at the bottom of the pecking order. It had me thinking of that other post-war phenomena the success of The Screwtape Letters.  Big devils lorded it over little devils. Louie met his nemesis in Matushiro Watanabe, ‘the Bird,’ at the gates of Omori camp in Tokoyo Bay at the end of September 1944. He was the camp’s disciplinarian, a sadist that delighted in manipulating and torturing his prisoners. Hillenbrand suggests he got sexual pleasure from hurting people, stretching factual research into fictional and novelistic techniques. He was evil and picked out Louie for his special consideration.

Even with the war ended and Louie married and back on home soil the Bird still haunted his dreams. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in which the past is always present and destroys veteran’s lives threatened to do the same to Louie.  He drunk more and more to cope and slipped into alcoholism. He planned to return to Japan and confront the Bird and kill him, but although classified as a war criminal in two years of searching for Watanabe the authorities could not find his whereabouts. He did survive, unrepentant of his own misdeeds.

Pestered into attending an evangelical convention, hosted by a young Billy Graham, Louie found God. He found forgiveness in forgiving the Bird. He found peace. He dedicated his life to helping others.  A remarkable man in any language, even in the language of the angels.