Laura Hillenbrand sure knows how to pick a story to tell. I think she’s only published two books in the past twenty years – “Seabiscuit” (1999) and “Unbroken” (2010) – but both have been mindboggling hits, selling over 13 million copies worldwide. However, reading “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,” the incredible life story of Olympic runner and WWII POW Louis Zamperini, left me with three unanswered questions.
The first question is: do prodigies or geniuses really exist? Malcolm Gladwell fairly convinced me they don’t. In his 2008 bestseller “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Gladwell argues that natural talent, while important, is not ultimately responsible for smashing success, no matter the endeavor. The very best performers in the world – whether in chess or violin or hockey – have dedicated at least ten thousand hours of rigorous training to reach the top. Simply put, there are no short cuts. There are no examples of a young lady picking up a violin at age 18 and playing Carnegie Hall the next. It just doesn’t happen. Or does it?
Consider the case of Louis Zamperini, a moderate juvenile delinquent from Torrance, California, who was forced onto the high school track team his sophomore year in an effort to keep him off the streets and out of trouble. If Hellenbrand is to be believed, Zamperini laced up some running shoes for the first time and, within a matter of months and without any meaningful coaching, had set the school record in the mile. In 1934, he would set the national high school record with a time of 4:21, a record that stood for 19 years. In 1936, Zamperini tried out for the US Olympic team in the 5,000 meters, a distance he had only competed in a couple of times before. He tied for first at the US Olympic trials and then finished 8th overall in Berlin in front of Adolph Hitler. He was only 19-years-old, the youngest American to ever qualify for the 5,000 meters in Olympic competition, before or since. On the morning before his B-24 Liberator crashed into the Pacific, Zamperini reportedly ran the mile in 4:12 – on a sandy beach in Hawaii! Had not the war and his debilitating experience in Japanese POW camps intervened, Hillenbrand suggests that Zamperini almost certainly would have broken the four-minute-mile before Roger Bannister in 1954.
In addition to being a wildly successful writer, Malcolm Gladwell is also a record-setting runner himself (he is reported to have run a 4:13 mile in college). I’d love to hear his thoughts on Zamperini’s exploits on the track and how his performance squares with Gladwell’s arguments around success as explained in “Outliers.”
My second question is: have the Japanese gotten off relatively easily for the atrocities they committed during the Second World War? When it comes to Germany and the Nazis, it seems to me that there is a palpable sense of “Never Forget,” which burns as brightly today as it did in the immediate aftermath of the war. I once had a senior manager from Germany who solemnly informed our team during an all-hands meeting that he had a great sense of humor but please never make any Nazi jokes. I just don’t get the sense that the same type of collective guilt hangs over the people of Japan, even though it probably should.
Louis Zamperini and two other crewmembers survived the crash of their B-24 Liberator, nicknamed The Green Hornet, while out searching for another lost bomber. After 47 days drifting 2,000 miles across the open ocean, they were picked up by a Japanese patrol on Kwajalein Island and eventually interned at a POW camp in Japan, which is when their real suffering began. Hillenbrand stresses the guilt and shame the Japanese associated with surrender. The 1941 Japanese Military Field Code spelled things out clearly: “Have regard for your family first. Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” The tangible results of such cultural conditioning are clear. Hillenbrand says that the ratio of Allied soldiers killed to Allied soldier captured in the Pacific Theater was 6-to-1; for the Japanese it was 120-to-1. The upshot was that the Japanese treated those they captured like ignominious rats. Again, some basic statistics provided by Hillenbrand tell the tale. During the course of the war, roughly 35,000 Americans were captured by the Japanese, nearly 13,000 of whom died while in captivity, a mortality rate of a shocking 37%. By comparison, American troops held in Nazi POW camps had a mortality rate of just 1%. And these numbers don’t include the countless summary executions and mass murder performed by Japanese soldiers that refused to take prisoners. Those, like Zamperini, who survived long stints in Japanese POW camps, were left with permanent injuries, both physical and mental.
In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing roughly 150,000 people. It seems as though both sides just sort of took a deep breath and said, “OK, now we’re even.”
My final question is: how did Louis Zamperini’s religious faith evolve over time? This is one of the great and unnecessary mysteries of “Unbroken.” Zamperini’s faith played a central role during his ordeal and his long recovery after it, but for some reason Hillenbrand seems determined to bury the lede. I think you can break Zamperini’s life into four phases. First, there was his life before the war. Hillenbrand says nothing about Zamperini’s religious life during this period. I’ve read in other sources that Zamperini was raised a “devout Catholic,” which would make sense for a family of Italian immigrants in the 1920s, but the author makes no mention of it, which is a shame because it might better help explain how he endured the trauma he faced during the war.
The second phase covers Zamperini’s war years, which were terrifying from beginning to end. A bombardier on a B-24 Liberator, Zamperini experienced harrowing missions over Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific. When his plane crashed in 1943, Zamperini and his pilot survived for weeks on rainwater and eating captured sea birds raw, all while being circled by ravenous sharks, day-and-night. Hillenbrand casually remarks that Zamperini prayed often during this ordeal, but she never provides any additional context or texture. Was Zamperini drawing upon a deep reservoir of religious faith? Was he praying for strength or forgiveness or both? Or was he simply praying for help? (After all, they say that nobody in a foxhole is an atheist.) Zamperini’s prayers continued in the face of relentless beatings and humiliating treatment at the hands of Japanese guards, particularly a sadistic monster the inmates called The Bird.
The third phase of Zamperini’s life was the dark years immediately after his return from the war. War injuries had prematurely ended his illustrious running career. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He turned to alcohol to alleviate his physical and mental suffering, which included incessant nightmares and other disturbing manifestations of his PTSD. Again, Hillenbrand only provides snippets, but we learn that Zamperini disallowed his new wife to go to church and expressed other strongly anti-religious views. It seems that in the aftermath of his trauma, Zamperini had turned his back on God and instead sought comfort in a bottle. This rejection of faith seemed to be quite deliberate, but Hillenbrand evidently chose not to explore it in her interviews with Zamperini.
The final phase of Zamperini’s life came in the early 1950s after his wife succeeded in dragging him to a revival meeting held by the evangelical preacher Billy Graham. The unwilling Zamperini was overcome by Graham’s passionate message of a loving and healing Christ. His nightmares and drinking stopped immediately. He remained a devout Christian and member of the Presbyterian Church for the rest of his life. Zamperini ultimately reached out to his wartime tormentor, The Bird, who had managed to elude war crimes prosecutors for years, and offered forgiveness for all the terrible things he did to him and the other prisoners. He also urged The Bird to become a Christian. My guess is that Hillenbrand and her editors deliberately soft pedaled Zamperini’s faith in order to better appeal to a mass market; an awe-inspiring story of patriotism and heroism will almost certainly sell more copies than one about individual salvation through Christ.
“Unbroken” is inspiring in many ways. Zamperini’s story is incredible. But perhaps what is most incredible is that his wartime experience was almost ordinary. Besides the 47-days at sea, Zamperini’s heroics in the B-24 and his fortitude inside the Japanese prison camps were shared by literally tens of thousands of other men. I served a year in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2010, which was was the most dangerous place during the most dangerous year of the two decade long conflict. My combat experiences were laughable compared to what Zamperini and his colleagues faced. I found that reading “Unbroken” was a great way to keep things in perspective.
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