Cold Open

It’s the afternoon of May 27th, 1943, in the skies above the Pacific Ocean, several hundred miles south of Hawaii.

Louis Zamperini stands on the flight deck of an American B-24 bomber. Louis is a 26-year-old Lieutenant in the US Army Air forces and while the pilot and co-pilot fly the plane, Louis carefully scans the waves ahead with a pair of binoculars.

Yesterday, an aircraft from Louis’s squadron set out from their airbase in Hawaii bound for Canton in China. But it never arrived. So today, Louis’s bomber is one of two that’s been sent out on a search and rescue mission, scouring the ocean for any sign of the missing plane or its crew.

Louis lowers his binoculars as a metallic rattle shudders through the plane. Looking out the window, Louis sees that one of the bomber’s four engines is shaking violently on its mounting. Then, the propeller blades stop turning.

Louis grips the metal walls of the flight deck to steady himself while the co-pilot urgently stabs at switches on the console.

But then, a second engine stops working. The pilot and co-pilot struggle to control the plane, but they can’t stop it tipping to the left... the bomber begin spiraling into a dive.

The pilot’s face turns pale, and he shouts at Louis to do his crash station - they’re going down. Louis fights the g-forces of the tumbling plane and clambers out of the cockpit and into the waist of the bomber. Five other crewmen are already in their seats as Louis takes his designated spot. Out of the window beside him, the sky spins round, faster and faster. He can’t see the ocean, but he knows it can’t be far below.

But then a strange sense of calm comes over him. Louis knows that this is his moment to die.

When the B-24 bomber hits the ocean surface, eight of the men on board are killed instantly. Louis Zamperini is not one of them though. Somehow, he and two others survive. But the plane crash is just the beginning. Louis and the others may be injured and stranded in the Pacific, but it will be another two years of suffering that follows after their bomber tumbled out of the sky on May 27th, 1943.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is May 27th, 1943: A B-24 Crash Survivor Begins a Fight for Survival.

Act One

It’s July 12th, 1936, at Randall’s Island Stadium in New York, seven years before Louis Zamperini’s bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean.

19-year-old Louis takes his mark on the running track, leaning forward slightly, and waits for the crack of the starter’s pistol. When the sound ricochets around the arena, Louis allows several frontrunners to sprint past him into the lead. Even though only the top three finishers will qualify for the American Olympic team, Louis is content to run in the pack of more than a dozen other athletes.

Despite lining up shoulder to shoulder with America’s fastest 5000-meter runners, Louis wasn’t a natural athlete growing up. A high-spirited child, Louis was encouraged to join the school track team by his older brother to help keep him out of trouble. And it worked. Louis got into shape and began to set high school and then college records. Even so, at today’s trials, Louis is up against the country’s top runners, and he isn’t expected to gain a spot on the US Olympic team.

But New York is sweltering in a heatwave, and that plays into Louis’s advantage. Louis’s favorite race is the 1500 meters, so he’s decided to save himself for that and take this longer event at a manageable pace. But the pre-race favorites are overconfident, and they’ve set off sprinting too quickly. After several laps, the intense heat begins to take its toll. They began to slow and, in the final two laps, the fresher Louis is able to up his pace and quickly close the gap on the frontrunners.

By the final straight, only one man, stands between Louis and victory. They match each other stride for stride, their legs and arms pumping as they sprint over the finishing line.

The timekeepers’ stopwatches can’t separate Louis from the other runner, so the officials record the race result as a dead heat. But who wins doesn’t actually matter. What’s more important is that both men have qualified for the US Olympic team and are headed to the games in Germany.

The following month, at the Berlin Olympics, Louis again crosses the line at the exact same time as an opponent during his 5000-meter heat. This time, though, officials can examine footage of the race and place Louis fifth, just ahead of an Italian runner. But it’s a crucial intervention, since it’s only the top five finishers in the heat who progress to the Olympic final.

In the gold-medal race, Louis replicates his race strategy from the American trials. He starts slowly, running at a manageable pace until he goes all-out for the final few laps. Louis’s last lap is easily the quickest of any athlete in the race and he thrills the crowd by overtaking several competitors as though they’re standing still. But the best runners in the world are still too far ahead, and Louis’s last-lap exploits aren’t enough to earn him a medal - he finishes the race in eighth place.

But Louis’s fast finish catches the attention of the guest of honor in the Olympic Stadium. After cleaning himself up, Louis wanders the stands with a camera to shoot a few photos for his family and friends back home. Coming close to the box used by visiting dignitaries, Louis spots Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler. Since taking power three years ago, Hitler has brutally suppressed his political opponents, and his aggressive posturing has fomented talk of war in Europe. Louis fundamentally disagrees with Hitler’s extreme ideology, but he can’t help getting a thrill from being so close to one of the world’s most notorious figures.

When Louis spots a sharp-faced man entering Hitler’s box, he doesn’t recognize Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and thinks nothing of beckoning the man over. Louis holds his camera out to Goebbels and asks him to take a photo of Hitler with it. Louis’s American team tracksuit marks him out as a competitor, so Goebbels does as Louis asks. But when he returns a few moments later, he brings an unexpected message for Louis : Adolf Hitler would like to meet him.

When Louis introduces himself to Hitler, Hitler congratulates Louis on his fast finish in the 5000 meters. The two men exchange a brief handshake before Louis is ushered away.

The interaction with Hitler is cordial, but it won’t be long before Louis is fighting against him. The next Olympic Games will be canceled after Hitler launches a genocidal war of aggression in Europe. All across the world, young men like Louis Zamperini will have to put their ambitions and careers on hold and risk their lives in the battle against fascism.

Act Two

It’s April 21st, 1943, in the skies over the Pacific Ocean, seven years after Louis Zamperini raced in the Berlin Olympic Games.

An ear-splitting succession of explosions rattles through the B-24 bomber Super Man. At his post at the front of the plane, Louis drops into a crouch as bullets punch a line of holes through the fuselage.

Louis joined the US Army Air forces in September 1941 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Three months later, the USA was dragged into World War Two by a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Louis spent months training as a bombardier before he finally flew his first mission in December 1942. Now, in April 1943, Louis feels like a veteran. A few minutes ago, Louis dropped another bomb load over the remote Nauru Island deep in the Pacific—but now, his squadron has come under attack by Japanese fighters.

Louis crawls through the Super Man to check for damage. The plane is perforated by bullet holes. The right rudder is shot through. Control cables have been cut. And the hydraulic lines have been severed, meaning that the plane has no flaps, no landing gear, no brakes for landing. And the crew has sustained damage as well. The B-24’s two waist gunners, its tail gunner, its top and belly turret gunners have all been hit by bullets or shrapnel. Louis sets to work patching them up as best he can as the plane’s pilots fight to keep control over the crippled aircraft.

Luckily, Super Man’s engines are undamaged, and the plane is able to remain in the relative safety of its formation until it makes it back to base in Hawaii. It’s a heavy landing though, which inflicts further damage on the plane. In the aftermath of the mission, the squadron leader has no choice but to pull Super Man from service. Its men are transferred to an alternative plane. But Louis and his crewmates aren’t happy with the new B-24 they’re given: Green Hornet has a poor record for reliability.

One month later, on May 27th, 1943, Green Hornet lives up to its reputation. The plane suffers mechanical problems on a search and rescue mission. And the pilot is forced to ditch at sea, killing eight of the crew.

Louis survives, alongside two others, Staff Sergeant Francis McNamara and First Lieutenant Russell Phillips. These survivors take to a life raft, but their hopes of rescue are slim. Green Hornet went down so quickly that there wasn’t enough time to send a distress signal. Now, the men bake in the sun aboard a raft helplessly drifting westwards, toward enemy territory. The three airmen have no supplies with them. They drink rainwater when they can and eat the occasional raw fish or seabird they manage to catch. But it’s not enough.

After 33 days at sea, Francis McNamara dies from exposure and starvation. Louis and Russell Phillips roll his body off the raft into shark-infested waters. They fear it won’t be long before they too succumb. The two men are starving. But they manage to last another twelve days, until they finally spot land. It’s the Japanese-occupied Marshall Islands. But after a month and a half at sea, Louis and Russell are in no state to escape from the enemy. They are immediately captured by the Japanese and sent to a prison of war camp.

There the conditions that Louis and his fellow prisoners endure are atrocious. The rations that are given by the Japanese are barely enough to live on. And the cells they are kept in are overcrowded, dirty, and a haven for disease.

Somehow, Louis is strong enough to cope with all this. But even he struggles with the inhumanity of the Japanese guards. Many of them seem to take sadistic pleasure in beating inmates for the smallest of infractions. Prisoners are whipped for merely folding their arms, brushing their teeth, or talking in their sleep. And the rules seem to change arbitrarily day-to-day, as if they’re designed to catch prisoners in infractions. All the POWs live in a constant state of fear, but for Louis it’s worse. Because when the Japanese find out that he was an American Olympic athlete, they make it their mission to hurt and humiliate him at every opportunity.

But while Louis and his fellow prisoners are tortured behind the walls of their prison camp, the war turns against the Japan and its fascist ally, Nazi Germany. By the fall of 1945, Adolf Hitler will be dead, Japan will have surrendered, and the POWs will finally be free. Only then will Louis Zamperini return home to the United States, more than two years after his plane took off on its doomed last mission over the Pacific.

Act Three

It’s September 1945 at an airfield in Okinawa, Japan, more than two years after Louis Zamperini’s air crash.

For the first time since his plane ditched in the Pacific Ocean, Louis finds himself aboard an aircraft—and it’s another B-24. But this one isn’t carrying bombs. It’s shuttling American servicemen who’ve been liberated from Japanese prison camps at the end of World War Two.

Louis’s presence in a camp came as a surprise to American officials. The Japanese authorities never registered him with the Red Cross as a prisoner of war. So, the US military had listed him as killed in action. Now, though, Louis has been found alive, and he’s on his way home to his surprised and overjoyed family.

The B-24 carrying Louis and his fellow ex-prisoners opens its throttle and speeds down the runway. But the plane is so full of men that it struggles to make it off the ground. Louis’s seat gives him a view through the open bomb bay doors, and he can see the bomber’s wheels bumping along the asphalt. Eventually, the plane does get airborne—but barely. And as the bomber flies over the end of the runway and out to sea, the spray from the waves just below brings vivid and terrifying memories of the crash flooding back to Louis.

They are memories he struggles with long after his return to America. He suffers regular flashbacks of his ordeal at sea and in captivity, and he starts drinking heavily to cope. Louis gets his life back on track though thanks to the support of his wife, and to a newfound faith in evangelical Christianity which leads him to eventually forgive his captors and even travel to Japan to meet them, becoming a symbol of American–Japanese reconciliation after the horrors of war.

Louis Zamperini will die in 2014 at the age of 97, but his extraordinary life will not be forgotten. Five months after his death, a movie based on his story will be released. Unbroken will recount Louis’s struggle to reach the Olympics, and the even greater battles that awaited after his plane crashed into the Pacific on May 27th, 1943.

Outro

Next on History Daily. May 28th, 1934. A media frenzy ignites when the first quintuplets to survive infancy are born, forcing the five sisters into a lifetime of exploitation.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Mollie Baack.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Reeves.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.