Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Summary

Unbroken is Laura Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, an American runner and Army Air Forces bombardier who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift in the Pacific and more than two years as a prisoner of war in Japan. The book begins with Louie as the restless, thieving son of Italian immigrants in Torrance, California, in the 1920s. His older brother Pete steers him into running, and Louie becomes a champion high-school miler known as the Torrance Tornado. At nineteen he makes the 1936 Olympic team, finishes eighth in the 5,000 meters in Berlin with a fast last lap that draws attention, and hopes to win at the 1940 Games, which the war cancels. Joining the Army Air Forces, he trains as a bombardier and is posted to Hawaii with the crew of a B-24 Liberator nicknamed Super Man, flown by his friend Russell Allen Phillips, called Phil. After a raid on Nauru, the badly damaged plane barely returns. On 27 May 1943 the crew takes a worn-out B-24 called the Green Hornet on a search mission; it crashes into the ocean, and only Louie, Phil and the tail gunner Francis McNamara, called Mac, survive. On two small rafts they endure thirst, hunger, sharks, a strafing Japanese bomber and storms, catching rainwater, birds and fish. Mac dies after about a month. After forty-seven days Louie and Phil reach the Marshall Islands and are captured by the Japanese. They are held at Kwajalein, then taken to Ofuna, a secret interrogation camp in Japan, and Louie is later moved to Omori near Tokyo, where a guard named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, whom the prisoners call the Bird, singles him out for cruel and humiliating treatment. Watanabe follows him to a camp at Naoetsu. The prisoners suffer hunger, disease and forced labor, and many are sustained by small acts of defiance and friendship. Back home, Louie is declared dead and then found alive. Liberated after Japan's surrender in 1945, he returns a hero, marries Cynthia Applewhite in 1946, but is tormented by nightmares of the Bird and falls into heavy drinking and plans for revenge. In 1949 Cynthia persuades him to attend Billy Graham's Los Angeles crusade, where he recalls his promises to God on the raft and turns to Christian faith. The nightmares end. He returns to Japan in 1950 to meet former guards at Sugamo Prison and forgive them, founds a camp for troubled boys, and in 1998 carries the Olympic torch at Nagano near the old Naoetsu camp. The book was published by Random House in November 2010 and spent years on best-seller lists; a film directed by Angelina Jolie followed in 2014.

Top Lessons

• Discipline built in youth

  Pete's patient training turns a boy headed for trouble into a champion runner. Hillenbrand shows that the habits of endurance and self-command Louie learned on the track helped him survive the raft and the camps. Discipline formed early becomes strength in a crisis.

• Keeping the mind alive

  On the raft Louie and Phil quiz each other, describe meals in detail, sing and plan for the future, and Hillenbrand presents this as part of why they survived. In the camps, prisoners keep up their spirits through humor, friendship and small acts of resistance. The book teaches that hope and a disciplined mind matter as much as physical strength.

• Dignity under cruelty

  The guards at Ofuna, Omori and Naoetsu try to humiliate the prisoners as well as hurt them, and Hillenbrand argues that dignity is as necessary to life as food and water. Louie's refusal to let the Bird break him is shown as an act of inner resistance. The book honors the courage of ordinary prisoners who kept their self-respect.

• Forgiveness and redemption

  After the war Louie survives his captors but is held captive by rage, nightmares and drink. At the 1949 Billy Graham crusade he remembers his prayers on the raft and turns to God, and his nightmares end. In 1950 he goes to Sugamo Prison in Tokyo to forgive former guards face to face. The book's subtitle names redemption as the end of the story.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Unbroken is a detailed account of survival medicine and its aftermath. On the raft the men face dehydration, starvation, exposure, salt-water sores and extreme weight loss; Hillenbrand describes how they rationed water and collected rain, ate raw birds and fish, and how Mac, who had eaten the emergency chocolate, declined and died. In the Japanese camps prisoners suffered from malnutrition, beriberi, dysentery and other diseases, beatings and forced labor; Hillenbrand also describes medical experiments on prisoners at Kwajalein, where Louie and Phil were injected with unknown substances, in restrained terms. After the war she shows Zamperini and other veterans struggling with what was then called combat fatigue: recurring nightmares of the Bird, flashbacks, rage and heavy drinking, with marital strain. In current terms this resembles post-traumatic stress disorder, though the diagnosis did not exist until 1980 and any retrospective label is interpretive. Hillenbrand presents his recovery after the 1949 crusade as a spiritual turning, with the nightmares ceasing; she reports this as his experience rather than a clinical claim.

• Part III (the raft)

  Thirst, rain-catching, rationing, raw food, shark attacks and the men's physical decline over forty-seven days.

• Part IV (Kwajalein)

  Injections given to the captured airmen in what appear to have been medical experiments.

• Part IV (Omori and Naoetsu)

  Hunger, dysentery, beatings and forced labor in the prisoner-of-war camps.

• Part V (homecoming)

  Recurring nightmares of the Bird, flashbacks, drinking and despair before the 1949 crusade.