On May 27, 1943, a B-24 Liberator bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a search mission. All the crewmen died, save three: Russel Allen Philips (“Phil”), the pilot, Francis McNamara (“Mac”), the tail gunner, and Louis Zamperini (“Zamp”), the bombardier.
They drifted in two rubber-and-canvas rafts lashed together on the world’s largest ocean, constantly circled by sharks, surviving on, first, emergency rations, then the odd fish they caught and rainwater harvested in a tin. They went without food or water for days together. Several rescue missions flew over and missed them and they managed to survive an attack by a Japanese Zero and a typhoon.
Mac eventually died but Phil and Zamp, close friends from boot camp, stayed alive by sheer willpower and luck until they were hauled in by the Japanese on the Marshall Islands. They had drifted 2,000 miles for 47 days, a survival record for airmen down in the Pacific at the time. The story could have ended here but what followed for Zamp and Phil were two years of almost unremitting torture and mistreatment at the hands of their Japanese captors.
As Japanese prisoners of war, their stories – admittedly horrific – could have been replicated by thousands of captured US and Allied servicemen almost anywhere in the south-east Asian theatre of war. The David Lean extravaganza The Bridge on the River Kwai became populist testimony to that (sadly, few remember the Indian soldiers and coolies on the same mission, their death toll higher than the white servicemen). Many soldiers and civilians have recorded their memories of the Bataan death marches in the Philippines and accounts of prison ordeals in Singapore and China and testimonies of Japanese war crimes abound.
But Unbroken is essentially the biography of Louis Silvie Zamperini, a former Olympic runner. In Laura Hillenbrand’s hands, it has certainly lived up to its dramatic cover blurb: “An extraordinary story of courage and survival”. Had it not been for the war, Zamp may have gone down as a footnote in sporting history.
His was a classic hardscrabble immigrant childhood in the melting pot of California. His father was a coal miner and construction worker in a small town called Torrance so there wasn’t a lot of money to go round. Zamp, headstrong and a social misfit, embarked on an early career of juvenile delinquency until his older brother Pete discovered his talent for running.
Louis was a reluctant convert but he gained enthusiasm once he discovered the scope athletics provided to impress the girls. Soon he was winning school, university and state competitions, setting a new university record for the mile in 1934.
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Nicknamed “The Torrance Tornado”, his focus changed. “Not long ago,” Hillenbrand writes, “Louie’s aspirations ended at whose kitchen he might burgle. Now he latched on to a wildly audacious goal: the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin.” But he wasn’t going to run the 1,500 metres, the race in which most milers competed but the 5,000 metres.
The 1936 Olympics became famous for the African-American sprinter Jesse Owens beating an “Aryan” hero in the 100 metres race in front of Hitler, in defiance of the Fuhrer’s race theories. Zamp didn’t win his event but he recorded the fastest finishes in the race (he came in eighth and broke the American record) and even met Hitler afterwards.
It is possible that Zamp might have gone on to bigger achievements had war not intervened as it did for many top sportsmen (including a certain Donald Bradman!). Drafted into the Army Air Corps, as the US Air Force was called in those days, he proved a reluctant pilot — flying made him airsick. He was training as a bombardier in Houston, Texas when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, the single act of aggression that drew America into the war and ultimately proved fatal for the Axis powers.
Hillenbrand can be criticised for describing Zamp’s ordeal in Japanese prison camps in tortuously superfluous detail. But it has relevance because of his post-war sufferings – the post-traumatic stress disorders that afflicted him and thousands of other war veterans – and the attempts to track down Matsuhiro Watanabe (nicknamed “The Bird” by prisoners), the psychopathic guard who singled him out for mistreatment.
She has certainly managed to produce a page-turner, enhanced by her eye for ambience and careful research. Hillenbrand is also scrupulously even-handed in her assessment of Japan’s role in the war, pointing to the fact that the Japanese perspective was very different from the Allies’.
All the same, it is difficult to miss the message of unalloyed courage and heroism in the title and the focus of this story. World War II was the last time the Americans fought and won on the “right” side. Published against the backdrop of the US military’s struggles and uncertainties in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s a warm feel-good factor here that would do no harm in these tough times.
UNBROKEN
An Extraordinary True Story of Courage and Survival
Laura Hillenbrand
HarperCollins
473 pages; Rs 399