bombers deliver food and clothing to the prisoners, Louie, emaciated and exhausted, finally feels free. This humiliation almost breaks Louie’s spirit for good, but he is just able to hold on.Īfter over two years of humiliating and torturing the prisoners, the Japanese suddenly announce that the war is over. Since he can no longer work, the Bird makes him clean out the pig sty with his hands. When a guard pushes him, Louie slips and breaks his leg. At this camp, Louie hauls tons of coal on his back all day. Soon after, the Bird transfers to another camp, but he brings Louie along with him so that he can continue the abuse. Louie refuses and they send him back to the prison camp. The propagandists tell Louie that he can leave the camp and live in a nice hotel if he agrees to read propaganda for them on the radio. and his family gets their first real indication that he’s alive. The Japanese broadcast Louie’s message throughout the U.S. army had mistakenly announced Louie’s death, but his family never lost hope that Louie was still alive. The Bird feels powerful abusing the prisoners and thinks that if he can break the spirit of a famous Olympian like Louie, then he can feel even more power.Īt one point, Japanese propagandists give Louie the opportunity to send his family a message over the radio. At the Omori camp, one of the head guards, Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe, singles out Louie for emotional and physical torture. Instead of executing them, the Japanese send Louie and Phil to separate labor camps in Japan. The Japanese bring Louie and Phil to a military base called “Execution Island” where they put them in small cages, give them almost no food, and inject them with experimental chemicals. After forty-seven days adrift on the raft, Louie and Phil fall into the hands of a passing Japanese military ship. But it’s not enough and Mac dies from malnourishment. The men collect rainwater, catch birds to use the meat for fishing, and even kill and eat a couple of sharks. On board an inflatable life-raft, the men have few rations, little water, and no protection from the hot sun or the sharks that constantly encircle them. On a routine mission, their new plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean and only Louie, Phil, and their new crewmate Francis “Mac” McNamara survive. But after Japanese planes nearly destroy Super Man during an air battle, Louie and his best friend Russell Allen “Phil” Phillips get reassigned to a new plane and crew. In 1941, Louie and the crew of the bomber, Super Man, engage in successful bombing runs of Japanese military targets. After military training, Louie becomes a bombardier and receives orders to report to a military base in the Pacific. With the Olympic Games cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II, Louie enlists in the Air Force. At the Games, Louie doesn’t win a medal but he does set a world record for the fastest last lap of an Olympic race.Īs Louie trains for the next Olympic Games, the world descends into war. After graduating high school, Louie wins an invitation to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Soon, Louie cleans up his act and becomes the fastest high school runner in recorded American history. Seeing Louie heading down the wrong path, his older brother Pete helps focus Louie’s unrestrained energies into running track. In Torrance, California in the early 1930s, a young boy named Louis “Louie” Zamperini spends his childhood stealing, pulling pranks, and getting into fights.
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