When Louis Zamperini’s plane crashed into the Pacific during World War II, the U.S. airman beat the odds and survived. He and two other crewmen climbed aboard inflated rafts. Despite being stranded in the impossibly huge expanses of the Pacific, they could count themselves fortunate. The other crewman had perished.
As they drifted uncontrollably on the ocean, the men were quickly racked by hunger, thirst and exposure. Sharks circled their bathtub-sized rafts, trying to get a bite out of them, and a Japanese plane happening to pass over bombarded them with bullets. Over the weeks that followed, the men drifted some 2,000 miles, surviving on the raft for 47 days.
When they finally bumped into the Marshall Islands, Zamperini and his surviving mate were apprehended by the Japanese, who controlled the islands and promptly made the two men prisoners of war.
Even by the standards of a plane-crash survivor, Zamperini had led a remarkable life. The son of Italian immigrants to California, he had been a terrible delinquent in his youth. But with help from his elder brother, Zamperini discovered a prodigious talent for running. Dubbed the “Torrance Tornado,” he became one of the best distance runners in the country.
At the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin, the 19-year-old Zamperini competed in the 5,000 meters. Although far from winning, he ran a blistering last lap, earning the attention of the crowd and a certain German politician. After the race, Zamperini was briefly introduced to Adolf Hitler. Years later, Zamperini and countless men would suffer the consequences of the war Hitler helped start.
Zamperini’s capture by the Japanese turned a new, even darker page in his trials. In Japan, where POWs were brutally mistreated, Zamperini would come face-to-face with a camp guard named Mutsuhiro Watanabe. Nicknamed “the Bird,” Watanabe sadistically beat and abused prisoners of war (POW), especially Zamperini, whom he made his choice target. As men around him starved and weakened, many dying, others crippled. Zamperini became desperate.
Zamperini was hardly a religious man, but as he had done when aboard the raft, so now he began to pray, begging God to rescue him. The answer, it seemed, was no. Watanabe had a free hand to torment him. Driven to desperation, Zamperini and a handful of POWs hatched a plan to drown Watanabe. But before they could carry it out, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan capitulated, and Watanabe disappeared.
With the war over, Zamperini was finally free. But Watanabe continued to haunt him, and the memories of what he had endured tormented him. Back in California, Zamperini became an unstable man, prone to drunkenness and brawling. He married, but that only made clearer what a broken man he was. Watanabe, though now a fugitive in Japan, stalked Zamperini’s dreams. And all the time, Zamperini’s life was crumbling.
When he had been aboard that raft in the Pacific, Zamperini made a promise: if God saved him, then he would become God’s servant. That promise, long ago forgotten, was now replaced with a consuming thirst to murder Watanabe. Zamperini began making plans to return to Japan. But God, it seemed, had not forgotten about him.
After his wife attended a sermon by the evangelist Billy Graham, Zamperini found himself roped into going as well. There, he remembered his promise to God and underwent a profound personal experience, becoming a Christian. As he considered his past, he suddenly saw not only his suffering, but, strangely, the love of God intervening to rescue him.
Throughout his life, Zamperini had beaten the odds again and again. He transformed from a delinquent and an outsider into an Olympic runner. He survived the ocean. He survived the Japanese camps. He endured beatings and starvation. Where countless others gave up or perished, Zamperini found a way forward.
But in the end, what threatened to destroy him was no physical ailment, but a malady of spiritual dimensions. The trauma he bore, the sense of degradation that filled him, stoked within him a hatred toward Watanabe. Though he was home, he still lived as a slave. What set him free, in Zamperini’s own words, was “a confrontation with God” (Hillenbrand 405).
In time, Zamperini would return to Japan and visit a prison that housed many of his former guards. But the thirst for revenge no longer animated him. He now considered himself redeemed and born anew, and saw the same potential in his former enemies. Zamperini greeted the guards, who had once shouted at him and beaten him, with a smile and extended hands.
Zamperini never met Watanabe, who evaded capture and was eventually pardoned. However, when Zamperini discovered his former tormentor was alive, he wrote him a letter chronicling his own transformation by Christ, saying, “Love replaced the hate I had for you” (Hillenbrand 405).
Zamperini’s story stretches the limits of human endurance and redemption. A tortured and broken man, on whom the light of grace shone, he found it within himself to forgive his enemies and seek their goodwill. His life stands as a bright beacon in the darkness.
Sources:
Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken: A World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption. Random House, 2010.
