Louis Zamperini: The Story of the Real-Life “Unbroken” Hero—In His Own Words

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we love our listeners’ stories. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. That’s ouramericanstories.com. They’re some of our favorite. Our next story was made into a 2014 motion picture directed by Angelina Jolie, based on the 2010 non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption. While some of the most remarkable parts of Zamparini’s story were left out of the film, you will be hearing them told now by the man himself. We’d like to thank the folks at Vision Video for giving us access to the footage you’re about to hear. Check out their selection of 1,900 video titles of uplifting, family-friendly videos at VisionVideo.com.

Let’s take a listen.

My name is Louis Zamparini. I was born January 26, 1917, in Oley and New York and moved to California for my health. I had pneumonia, and so ever since I was two years old, I lived in Torrance, California. It’s south of L.A. about 20 miles. And I’m afraid I was in constant conflict with the Torrance police. I was a rascal, and I think it all started with the—I couldn’t speak English, and the other kids were teasing me. They wanted to hear me swear in Italian. You know, these were your bullies, they call them today. And so my dad got me some weights, a punching bag, and I started getting in shape. And so then after a few months, I started fighting back. When I started fighting back, they stopped teasing me. In the meantime, time, I continued with my errant ways, and I had been dissipating. I started smoking when I was five, and during that time it was Prohibition.

But everybody made beer.

Wine and other things, and we knew who made it, and when they were at the movies on Saturday night, we would hijack the stuff. And even if they knew we took it, they couldn’t turn a cent to the police, or they’d go to jail. So that was my life as a teenager until my brother got me on the track—what they call an intraclass track meet—and the pains of exhaustion. That’s the worst.

And that was it. No more running.

So a week later, we’re having our first bull meet with Narbonne High School, and everybody assisted. I represent the school in this race, the same 660-yard run, and they finally talked me into it. The first two runners from Narbonne had finished, and the third Manzon headed me about 50 years ago. I wasn’t about to, you know—until the students, a thousand students from my high school, started screaming, “Come on, Louie!” Well, those were beautiful words to me because I had no idea that anyone at

all knew my name.

Here a thousand students are hollering, “Come on, Louie!” And that tasted pretty good, and I just got up a little adrenaline, I suppose. I finally nipped this guy at the tape by about six inches and came in third. So after that, I thought about that recognition. That was important to me, and I think it’s important to all athletes. The thing that inspires you and creates the desire to go ahead and become a champion is a recognition. And so that night I had to make a decision, and that was, no doubt, the first wise decision of my life. I decided to go all out to become a runner. Considering my life, you think that was an impossibility. My family thought it was an impossibility, my brother thought. But I made up my mind, and I became a dramatic trainer. No more dessert. I ran everywhere, no hitchhiking. I ran on back four miles or most of them back. I run like 12 miles on a Saturday. I hit the mountain, ran around the lakes, jumped on, and I got so I liked it. I was not getting tired anymore and fatigued, and I enjoyed mainly not running around the track, but running in the wilderness and jumping over streams. I can remember on a number of occasions chasing deer down the hill just for the part of it.

And so all that running, and in no days—

There were no stopwatches around, so I had no idea how fast I was running, didn’t even care. I just started enjoying running. And finally, at the end of the summer, the first running race was a Far West AAU cross country at USC, L.A., two miles, about 101 runners. When the race was over, I won by a quarter a mile, or over a quarter, and I couldn’t believe it. I said, “No, I’m sure I can corner.” I wouldn’t take credit for winning, and the official said, “No, all the challengers are in. You passed every checkpoint.” And they said, “By the way, you won all three records: Class A, Class B, and Class C, and you ran the two miles in 9:57, which was comparable to college running.”

And I was a sophomore in high school. So that did it.

I knew that hard work was the answer, and from then on I never lost a race for three and a half years. The best—the second best 5,000-meter runner in America—was coming to California to run, to draw a big crowd and so forth, and my brother said, “I want you to train.”

“You got two weeks.”

I want to run against this guy. Now, we had no hopes of the Olympics. Just run against him to see how close you can get to a fellow who’s going to make the Olympic team. And that would have been a victory in itself. And I got—I caught him at the tape by about two inches. So I knew that I could beat the second best runner in America. And this gave me the power, stability, of making the team.

Now.

I didn’t think about the team at that time until the next day when I got a call from the newspaper that the Olympic Committee had called Torrance to tell them that I qualified for the Olympic tryouts at Randall’s Island, New York. And again, it wasn’t important to win. I made the team and the thrill, and I’m on this ship now with all these great athletes, and they were all my heroes. And number one, around meeting all the athletes and go off the ship at Hamburg and off to Berlin. And then they took us into the most beautiful Olympic village ever made, and it was gorgeous. Finest animals running loose, lakes, stormtroopers walking through, and we’d give them the Heil Hitler salute with a big laugh on our face, and they knew we were kidding. They’d salute back. If we said, “Heil up,” they’d say, “Heil Hitler,” or vice versa. And so they were a lot of fun.

And you’re listening to the voice of the one and only Louis Zamparini, raised in Torrance, California, as he said, a self-proclaimed rascal in his youth. But hearing those words, “Come on, Louie!” get chanted by students—that recognition—well, that was all the fuel he needed. It lit a fire in this young man, and he said it was the first wise decision in my life: to become a runner. When we come back, more of this remarkable life story, Louis Zamparini’s story, here on Our American Stories. Here on Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories. Let’s return to Louis Zamparini and where he left off with his arrival to Berlin, Germany, to compete as a 19-year-old distance runner in the 1936 Summer Olympics, also known as the Nazi Olympics.

So I got in the semifinals, and fortunately, I made the final. And the last lap comes, and I’m 50 yards behind the leaders. Something my brother had taught me when I was—I used to complain about the third lap

of the mile being…

tired. And he said, “Some of the other runners, they’re all human beings; they’re all tired.

But think of it this way:

You’ve got a lap to go, about one minute. Here, is none of the pain worth a lifetime of glory?”

“And I never forgot that.” And so I opened up the last lap.

And I caught the leaders coming down on the homestretch. So I did come in with the leaders. Then, doing so, the coach said, “You just ran the last quarter in 56 seconds,” which was considered impossible for a distance runner. And, uh, that evidently caught the attention of Adolf Hitler.

He was there every day.

And I go back to my box after my shower, and an officer comes over and says, “Hitler wants to meet you.” First, he asked my name. I said, “I—you didn’t do anything, you know, he was shaking hands with the gold medalists.” He said, “Well, he wants to meet you.” So I went over to him, and he just reached down, shook my hand, and simply said, “The boy with the—” He said, “Oh yeah, the boy with the fast finish!” And that was it. So, meeting the Führer didn’t mean anything. But my opinion of him was the same opinion that Martin Luckman had and all the others. “You look like a comedian, and the way he acted, stomping his feet, pounding his legs, and face, a mustache, and all that.”

Uh, so that was my opinion of him. Uh.

Well, the games are over, and we collected souvenirs. All the Olympians did, to remind them of their Olympic trip. And now I’m back home entering USC as a freshman, and now the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. We’re all aiming for that, and suddenly we get the announcement—headlines of papers: “The Olympics are canceled!” Well, it was quite a blow, you know. Athletes couldn’t understand it. For a kid who’s been aiming for four years for one race, and you’re going to hit your peak of your life at that particular year—that was hard to take. Until Pearl Harbor was hit, and of course, we forgot all about being athletes. And like all other Americans, we are one mind, of one accord, one purpose: getting the war quickly, get it over with as fast as possible. However, I did run in Hawaii to

keep in shape.

And even though General Arnold, in charge of the Air Force, through a friend—he was a friend of mine indirectly—but they wouldn’t allow me to go back. Because our bomb group was a special bomb group and experimental. We were the first to use the heaviest bombing of the war: for dive bombing. So we had a lot of missions up and down the Marshalls and Gilberts, bombing Makin, Kwajalein, and Wotje, and all those islands, you know. And now we had a few local search missions looking for submarines. And then we came back, and after a mission, you get a couple of days off, and we’re heading for the main gate on the way to Honolulu, and the operations officer comes skidding up in the jeep and says, “We just got a report of a B-25 that’s gone down 200 miles north of Palmyra.” Now, the cloud cover was broken, a PBY at 1,000 feet—that’s our search mission height—and swinging here and there looking for debris in the water—rife, raft, anything we could find. And suddenly the RPMs dropped on one motor, oil pressure to zero, and the pilot had immediately called the new engineer, and he was so excited to do his job. He came up and nervously feathered the wrong motor. And all this plane could not fly normally on four motors. It couldn’t get off the ground with the bomb load. It was the Green Hornet—was a lemon—and with one motor out, the plane was having trouble. And now when he feathered the wrong motor, the plane just healed over and went down left wing first, 45 degrees into the water, and exploded. The pilot and tail gunner were fortunately blown free of the wreckage. And then the tail snapped off the control wires, which are heavy wires that were springing. So when the wires made it coiled up, and they—so when they snapped—

The wires coiled around the tripod. I’m in the middle.

I can’t get loose now with the wires. There’s no hope, it’s a situation, and so I just thought—

“Well, this is it; this is dead.”

I’m dead. And so I started sinking. My ears popped, and that usually happened around 25–30 feet. And then as I sank deeper, something I never had happen before. I felt like someone in the solar plexus with a sledgehammer. And then I lost consciousness, and of course, I’m thinking, “I’m still sinking,” so the pressure has got to be getting greater. And when, then, I lost consciousness, and if for some unknown reason, I’m conscious again. I’m free. I’m loosening from that section of the ship. I’m flailing my arms trying to find something to grab onto, and fortunately, my U.S.A. ring, which was on this finger, was bearing the white stars, still there. It snagged on the waist window, and I knew that was a waist window by the feel. I grabbed with my other hand, worked my back out of the window, and pulled my life jacket and popped to the surface. And there I saw my two buddies, who were now hanging onto a gas tank. They were both in a state of shock, screaming, “Help!” And the pilot’s head was bleeding profusely with a bad injury, and there’s no way

I can help them.

If I swim over to help them, we’re all dead. I saw a life raft that had ejected from the plane automatically, and so there’s a 100-foot cord dragging behind the life raft.

So I’m trying to swim to the…

life raft, with shoes on, clothes on, and it’s impossible, even in a swimsuit. I couldn’t have caught that raft; the currents were that vicious. But as I almost gave up swimming, this cord was going by my face.

I couldn’t see it in the water.

I grabbed the last 2 or 3 feet, and I reeled in the raft, and I got to…

The pilot. Copilot. Pulled him aboard.

But, I took two T-shirts, made a wet compress, put it on the cuts, tied it with the other T-shirt very tightly so it wouldn’t bleed anymore, and I laid him back. And then I started thinking about that escape.

That really bugged me.

And I kept thinking of any kind of a logical answer for my escape, and I just couldn’t find one, so I gave up thinking about it. Instead, I started praying and thanking God for sparing my life. Well, my buddy saw this. They started to pray with me. And then it wasn’t long after that the tail gunner panicked and began to scream, and it suddenly dawned on him what had happened. “We’re all going to die!” Then I said, “Mac, nobody’s going to die.” “We’re gonna die!” I said, “Mac, nobody’s going to die.” And then I told him to shut up. I said, “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to make a report on you to the military when we get back.” And, uh, he still kept screaming. So I tried to use child psychology, and that didn’t work. So I thought I’d give my double shock, and this is the last resort—a good shock treatment. So I turned my back on him. Then I came around with the back of my hand and cracked him hard across the face. He laid back in the raft, content, and he was okay for maybe five days, a week. And then I had to do it again. But it always seemed to work, and he never reacted. I just laid back and seemed to enjoy it. So our menu, of course, now for the next 47 days, was what birds, fish, and water we could catch. And, of course, the birds and the fish we simply ate raw. Three albatross. Well, we actually caught four albatross, and we caught the first; only caught. We just ripped it open, and the smell was enough. We threw it overboard. The second one we caught, I said, “We got to eat some part of it, you know.” And so we took a piece of breast. We tried to take a bite out of the piece of breast and try to chew

it up and swallow. We just barely swallowed one.

Mouthful again. We—we threw it overboard and used parts of it to bait, and we did catch a small fish. We divided that three ways, and that wasn’t bad, raw fish. And then, uh, a lot of time went by before we got another albatross. Now, at all.

“Yeah, there’s another albatross.”

We opened it up, and may I say, it was like a hodgepodge—funny, with guts on it.

We ate everything, eyeballs and all.