A Remarkable Life
WWII hero Louis Zamperini dies at age 97
Louis Zamperini competed against the Third Reich’s best athletes in the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Nazi Germany.
And a few years later he fought the Japanese as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps during World War II.
His plane malfunctioned and crashed into the sea, and he spent 47 days on a life raft in the Pacific. His parents received a telegram signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt saying he had been killed in action.
But he wasn’t. He was captured by the Japanese and endured a living hell in a series of prisoner of war camps
In 1945 Zamperini was liberated from a POW camp northwest of Tokyo. He was a living skeleton, sick and malnourished. But he survived. Born in 1917 to Italian immigrants in New York, Zamperini grew up in Califonia after his family moved to Torrance in 1919.
In high school he excelled at track, setting a world record for the mile in 1934.
He made the U.S. Olympic 5,000-meter team and traveled to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics.
Zamperini finished eighth in the event. He met and shook the hand of Adolph Hitler. He later said he was politically naive and thought the Nazi dictator was a somewhat comical figure, like a bombastic character from a Laurel and Hardy film.
It wasn’t long before WWII changed his view.
Zamperini joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He earned a commission as a second lieutenant and, after the U.S. entered the war, saw combat on a B-24 Liberator.
His plane’s plunge into the ocean left Zamperini and two other men as the only survivors. They clung to the life raft, collected rain for drinking water and survived on fish and sea birds. One of the men died after 33 days at sea.
Zamperini and the other survivor were captured by the Japanese after they reached land in the Marshall Islands. The two were subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of their captors.
After the war, Zamperini married and tried to rebuild his life. But he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder— something few doctors recognized in those days. He took to the bottle to battle his demons. It almost cost him his marriage.
But his wife would not give up on him and convinced Zamperini to attend a series of Billy Graham crusades held in 1949 Los Angeles. The message took, and Zamperini became a born-again Christian.
That experience led him back to Japan in 1950, where he worked as a missionary. At Sugamo prison in Tokyo, he spoke to many of the men who had been his guards—and were now prisoners themselves for war crimes. He forgave them. And he told them that God would forgive them as well.
He kept up his religious work, took on speaking engagements and made a living in commercial real estate. He never lost his love of athletics and was skateboarding into his 80s and skiing into his 90s. He and his wife Cynthia remained married until her death in 2011.
Zamperini wrote two autobiographies of his own, and the most recent book about his life, “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption” by Lauren Hillenbrand, was published in 2010, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It has been adapted for a film that is set to be released in December.
Capt. Louis Zamperini, American hero, died Wednesday at the age of 97. Men like him are few and far between. He led a truly remarkable life.