Laura Hillenbrand - Unbroken

LAURA HILLENBRAND

Unbroken

An Extraordinary True Story of

Courage and Survival

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk

Originally published in the United States by Random House in 2010

Copyright © Laura Hillenbrand 2010

The right of Laura Hillenbrand to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

HB ISBN 9780007378012

TPB ISBN 9780007386642

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007378029

Version: 2018-07-06

For the wounded and the lost

What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

—Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”

Title Page

Copyright

PREFACE

PART I

One The One-Boy Insurgency

Two Run Like Mad

Three The Torrance Tornado

Four Plundering Germany

Five Into War

PART II

Six The Flying Coffin

Seven “This Is It, Boys”

Eight “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”

Nine Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes

Ten The Stinking Six

Eleven “Nobody’s Going to Live Through This”

PART III

Twelve Downed

Thirteen Missing at Sea

Fourteen Thirst

Fifteen Sharks and Bullets

Sixteen Singing in the Clouds

Seventeen Typhoon

PART IV

Eighteen A Dead Body Breathing

Nineteen Two Hundred Silent Men

Twenty Farting for Hirohito

Twenty-one Belief

Twenty-two Plots Afoot

Twenty-three Monster

Twenty-four Hunted

Twenty-five B-29

Twenty-six Madness

Twenty-seven Falling Down

Twenty-eight Enslaved

Twenty-nine Two Hundred and Twenty Punches

Thirty The Boiling City

Thirty-one The Naked Stampede

Thirty-two Cascades of Pink Peaches

Thirty-three Mother’s Day

PART V

Thirty-four The Shimmering Girl

Thirty-five Coming Undone

Thirty-six The Body on the Mountain

Thirty-seven Twisted Ropes

Thirty-eight A Beckoning Whistle

Thirty-nine Daybreak

EPILOGUE

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Also by Laura Hillenbrand

About the Publisher

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER.

It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.

The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean.

A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.

On that morning of the twenty-seventh day, the men heard a distant, deep strumming. Every airman knew that sound: pistons. Their eyes caught a glint in the sky—a plane, high overhead. Zamperini fired two flares and shook powdered dye into the water, enveloping the rafts in a circle of vivid orange. The plane kept going, slowly disappearing. The men sagged. Then the sound returned, and the plane came back into view. The crew had seen them.

With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted, their voices thin from thirst. The plane dropped low and swept alongside the rafts. Zamperini saw the profiles of the crewmen, dark against bright blueness.

There was a terrific roaring sound. The water, and the rafts themselves, seemed to boil. It was machine gun fire. This was not an American rescue plane. It was a Japanese bomber.

The men pitched themselves into the water and hung together under the rafts, cringing as bullets punched through the rubber and sliced effervescent lines in the water around their faces. The firing blazed on, then sputtered out as the bomber overshot them. The men dragged themselves back onto the one raft that was still mostly inflated. The bomber banked sideways, circling toward them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them.

Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak to go back in the water. As they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads, Zamperini splashed overboard alone.

Somewhere beneath him, the sharks were done waiting. They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the raft.

Courtesy of Louis Zamperini. Photo of original image by John Brodkin.

IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS OF AUGUST 26, 1929, IN THE back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound.