Louie Zamperini was a troubled youth growing up in Torrance, California. The child of poor Italian immigrants, he learned to steal to get the things he wanted as a child. However, he was very successful at escaping the police because of his prowess as a runner. No one could catch Louie.
After graduating from high school, he received a track scholarship at the University of Southern California and immediately began training for the 1936 Olympics. While he was still a teenager, he competed in the 5000 meters and came in seventh in the world.
As he trained for the 1940 Olympics games to be held in Tokyo, the United States declared war against the Japanese and entered W. W. II. Louie was drafted into the Air Force and was stationed in the Pacific Theater. He was assigned to a B-24. While on a mission to find the survivors of a downed plane, the B-24 had engine trouble and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, exploring on impact.
There were three survivors all thrown from the plane, and they began to drift in two small rafts westward toward the Japanese-held Marshall Islands. They had little water (only from occasions rainstorms, food (fish and birds they caught and ate raw), or medicine from a small first aid kit found on board the raft.
During that time, while experiencing deep hunger, thirst, and depression, Louie told God that if He would provide for them, Louie would serve God for the rest of his life. Only two of them survived the 47-day arduous journey
Eventually, they landed on an atoll in the Marshalls and were captured by Japanese soldiers. Louie’s incarceration as a Prisoner of War (P. O. W.) was brutal. The severe daily beatings, inhuman living conditions, starvation, and the lack of potable drinking water facing the P. O. W.’s, killed more than one-third of them and left others, including Louie, with physical and mental conditions that would haunt most of them for the rest of their lives.
An especially disdainful corporal Watanabe, who the men called the Bird, chose Louie to be his personal whipping boy. He viciously attacked Louie day after day, savagely beating him or having him pummeled by the other guards for hours at a time. Louie ended up many days unconscious, lying in the yard outside the barracks. In addition, the Bird humiliated Louie by stripping his skin and bone body and tying him to a stake for everyone to see.
There were times when the Bird would take off his belt with a large square buckle and beat Louie across the head until he fell unconscious to the ground. Louie was a P. O. W. for about two-and-a-half years. During his incarceration, every time he was transferred to a new facility, the Bird was there, ready to continue the daily beatings. Louie could not escape the Bird.
The dropping of the two atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima finally was the straw that broke the Japanese’s will to fight on, and they surrendered in late summer of 1945. Louie was free to go home to his family.
Now, being a celebrity, Louie traveled the country speaking on behalf of the U. S. Armed Forces. While on one such trip, he met a beautiful and wealthy young lady who was from Florida, Cynthia Applewhite. In a few months, they were married. Shortly after his marriage to Cynthia, Louie began having vicious nightmares where the Bird would begin beating him again, and Louie would strangle him, trying to kill him, but he couldn’t squeeze hard enough to finish the job.
Night after night, the realistic beating continued with the same results. Believing the only way to get relief was to find Watanabe and kill him. He tried investing money to earn enough to return to Japan but was swindled out of every dollar he had.
His hate for the Bird consumed him to the point where he began drinking earlier and earlier in the day until he passed out at night. I was his only escape from the nightly beatings.
In October of 1949, Cynthia decided to go with some friends to hear Billy Graham in his first crusade in Los Angeles. She begged Louie to go with her, but he refused. He was so filled with hate that Louie couldn’t bear to listen to a preacher yell and scream at him. Cynthia was convicted of her sin that night when the opportunity was given to go forward to accept Jesus as her personal Savior, she didn’t hesitate. She became a new believer.
That night was supposed to be the last night of the crusade but due to the massive crowds, the evangelism committee scheduled it for another three weeks. Cynthia begged Louie to go with her and encouraged her friends to convince him. Finally, Louie agreed to go but only if the sat in the back of the tent. When they gave the invitation, he stormed from the tent furious that he had gone. That evening the nightmare returned more malicious than before.
Cynthia begged him to go back again and he reluctantly agreed to return but only if they could leave as soon as the altar call started. That night as Billy Graham spoke on the beatings that Christ experience and his death upon the cross, Louie became filled with anger and at the moment of the altar call got up and headed for the tent door. Suddenly, he remembered the promise that he made to God in the raft that if God would give them water, Louie would serve Him for the rest of his life. Louie went forward and accepted Jesus as his Savior and Lord.
That night the Holy Spirit brought comfort to Louie Zamperini. The grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ flowed in Louie and he was born anew, redeemed from his sin and the demons that were the captors of his mind. The nightmares ceased. That night the power of the Holy Spirit cleansed Louie’s mind of the hatred toward the Japanese torturers evaporated. That night Mutsuhiro Watanabe, the Bird, stop beating him. That night Louie begin to fulfill his promise to God.[1] - Laura Hillenbrand
[1] Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, Adapted from the book Unbroken the Story of Louie Zamperini
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