Louis Silvie Zamperini (26 January 1917-2 July 2014) was an American Olympic distance runner who served as a US Air Force bombardier during World War II. In 1943, he was taken prisoner by Japan after 47 days spent adrift in the Pacific Ocean following a plane crash, and he endured two years of hard labor and torture in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps before his release. After the war, he became an evangelical Christian and preached forgiveness over revenge, even visiting and forgiving his captors.
Biography[]
Louis Zamperini was born in Olean, Cattaraugus County, New York in 1917, the son of Italian immigrant parents from Verona. He was raised in California from the age of two, first living in Long Beach, and then in Torrance. As a boy, he was bullied for coming from an Italian immigrant family where no English was spoken, and he got into several fights as a youth and was once caught by police while stealing a beer. His older brother Pete persuaded him to join his high school track team to save him from a life of delinquency, and he was undefeated throughout his student track-and-field career. In 1936, he qualified for the Olympics at the age of 19, finishing 8th in the 5,000-meter distance event and leading to a brief personal meeting with the German dictator Adolf Hitler, who shook his hand and commended him for his fast finish. He went on to attend college, and he joined the US Air Force (Army Air Corps at that time) in September 1941 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Zamperini went on to serve as a B-24 bombardier, taking part in a bombing raid against Japanese-occupied Nauru in April 1943. On 27 May 1943, during another mission, his plane crashed 850 miles south of Oahu due to mechanical difficulties, killing 8 of the 11 men onboard. Zamperini, pilot Russell Allen Phillips, and Francis McNamara survived the crash and boarded two inflatable rafts, subsisting on rainwater, small fish eaten raw, and birds that landed on their raft. They were forced to fend off constant shark attacks and were nearly capsized by a storm, and McNamara died 33 days into their odyssey. On the 47th day, Zamperini and Phillips reached the Marshall Islands and were immediately taken prisoner by the Imperial Japanese Navy, being sent to different prisoner-of-war camps. They were held on Kwajalein for 42 days before being transferred to the Ofuna prisoner of war camp, and Zamperini was then sent to Tokyo's Camp Omori. While there, he was repeatedly tortured by the prison guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who saw strength in Zamperini on the first day, and sought to break him. Following the bombing of Tokyo, Zamperini was transferred to the Naoetsu prisoner-of-war camp in northern Japan, where he remained until the war ended.
Zamperini returned home to a hero's welcome, and he experienced PTSD after the war and turned to drinking. His wife, whom he married in 1946, encouraged him to attend one of Billy Graham's crusades in 1949, leading to Zamperini becoming an evangelical Christian and forgiving his captors, causing his nightmares to cease. He became an evangelist and visited many of the Japanese POW camp guards in Japan, letting them know that he had forgiven them; he even visited the infamous Sugamo Prison in Tokyo in October 1950, converting some convicted war criminals to Christianity. During the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Zamperini ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay not far from the POW camp where he had been held, but Watanabe refused to meet with him during Zamperini's visit to Japan. Zamperini died of pneumonia in 2014 at the age of 97.
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