Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (4 page)

He came home with a mania for running. Al of the effort that he’d once put into thieving he threw into track. On Pete’s instruction, he ran his entire paper route for the Torrance Herald, to and from school, and to the beach and back. He rarely stayed on the sidewalk, veering onto neighbors’ lawns to hurdle bushes. He gave up drinking and smoking. To expand his lung capacity, he ran to the public pool at Redondo Beach, dove to the bottom, grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there, hanging on a little longer each time. Eventual y, he could stay underwater for three minutes and forty-five seconds.

People kept jumping in to save him.

Louie also found a role model. In the 1930s, track was hugely popular, and its elite performers were household names. Among them was a Kansas University miler named Glenn Cunningham. As a smal child, Cunningham had been in a schoolhouse explosion that kil ed his brother and left Glenn with

severe burns on his legs and torso. It was a month and a half before he could sit up, and more time stil before he could stand. Unable to straighten his legs, he learned to push himself about by leaning on a chair, his legs floundering. He graduated to the tail of the family mule, and eventual y, hanging off the tail of an obliging horse named Paint, he began to run, a gait that initial y caused him excruciating pain. Within a few years, he was racing, setting mile records and obliterating his opponents by the length of a homestretch. By 1932, the modest, mild-tempered Cunningham, whose legs and back were covered in a twisting mesh of scars, was becoming a national sensation, soon to be acclaimed as the greatest miler in American history. Louie had his hero.

In the fal of 1932, Pete began his studies at Compton, a tuition-free junior col ege, where he became a star runner. Nearly every afternoon, he commuted home to coach Louie, running alongside him, subduing the jimmying elbows and teaching him strategy. Louie had a rare biomechanical advantage, hips that rol ed as he ran; when one leg reached forward, the corresponding hip swung forward with it, giving Louie an exceptional y efficient, seven-foot stride. After watching him from the Torrance High fence, cheerleader Toots Bowersox needed only one word to describe him: “Smoooooth.”

Pete thought that the sprints in which Louie had been running were too short. He’d be a miler, just like Glenn Cunningham.

In January 1933, Louie began tenth grade. As he lost his aloof, thorny manner, he was welcomed by the fashionable crowd. They invited him to weenie bakes in front of Kel ow’s Hamburg Stand, where Louie would join ukulele sing-alongs and touch footbal games played with a knotted towel, contests that inevitably ended with a cheerleader being wedged into a trash can. Capitalizing on his sudden popularity, Louie ran for class president and won, borrowing the speech that Pete had used to win his class presidency at Compton. Best of al , girls suddenly found him dreamy. While walking alone on his sixteenth birthday, Louie was ambushed by a giggling gaggle of cheerleaders. One girl sat on Louie while the rest gave him sixteen whacks on the rear, plus one to grow on.

When the school track season began in February, Louie set out to see what training had done for him. His transformation was stunning. Competing in black silk shorts that his mother had sewn from the fabric of a skirt, he won an 880-yard race, breaking the school record, co-held by Pete, by more than two seconds. A week later, he ran a field of milers off their feet, stopping the watches in 5:03, three seconds faster than Pete’s record. At another meet, he clocked a mile in 4:58. Three weeks later, he set a state record of 4:50.6. By early April, he was down to 4:46; by late April, 4:42. “Boy! oh boy! oh boy!”

read a local paper. “Can that guy fly? Yes, this means that Zamperini guy!”

Almost every week, Louie ran the mile, streaking through the season unbeaten and untested. When he ran out of high school kids to whip, he took on Pete and thirteen other col ege runners in a two-mile race at Compton. Though he was only sixteen and had never even trained at the distance, he won by fifty yards. Next he tried the two-mile in UCLA’s Southern California Cross Country meet. Running so effortlessly that he couldn’t feel his feet touching the ground, he took the lead and kept pul ing away. At the halfway point, he was an eighth of a mile ahead, and observers began speculating on when the boy in the black shorts was going to col apse. Louie didn’t col apse. After he flew past the finish, rewriting the course record, he looked back up the long straightaway. Not one of the other runners was even in view. Louie had won by more than a quarter of a mile.

He felt as if he would faint, but it wasn’t from the exertion. It was from the realization of what he was.

Louie wins the 1933 UCLA Cross Country two-mile race by more than a quarter of a mile. Pete is running up from behind to greet him. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Three

The Torrance Tornado

IT HAPPENED EVERY SATURDAY. LOUIE WOULD GO TO THE track, limber up, lie on his stomach on the infield grass, visualizing his coming race, then walk to the line, await the pop of the gun, and spring away. Pete would dash back and forth in the infield, clicking his stopwatch, yel ing encouragement and instructions. When Pete gave the signal, Louie would stretch out his long legs and his opponents would scatter and drop away, in the words of a reporter,

“sadly disheartened and disil usioned.” Louie would glide over the line, Pete would be there to tackle him, and the kids in the bleachers would cheer and stomp. Then there would be autograph-seeking girls coming in waves, a ride home, kisses from Mother, and snapshots on the front lawn, trophy in hand.

Louie won so many wristwatches, the traditional laurel of track, that he began handing them out al over town. Periodical y, a new golden boy would be touted as the one who would take him down, only to be run off his feet. One victim, wrote a reporter, had been hailed as “the boy who doesn’t know how fast he can run. He found out Saturday.”

Louie’s supreme high school moment came in the 1934 Southern California Track and Field Championship. Running in what was celebrated as the best field of high school milers in history, Louie routed them al and smoked the mile in 4:21.3, shattering the national high school record, set during World War I, by more than two seconds.* His main rival so exhausted himself chasing Louie that he had to be carried from the track. As Louie trotted into Pete’s arms, he felt a tug of regret. He felt too fresh. Had he run his second lap faster, he said, he might have clocked 4:18. A reporter predicted that Louie’s record would stand for twenty years. It stood for nineteen.

Louie and Pete. Bettmann/Corbis

Once his hometown’s resident archvil ain, Louie was now a superstar, and Torrance forgave him everything. When he trained, people lined the track fence, cal ing out, “Come on, Iron Man!” The sports pages of the Los Angeles Times and Examiner were striped with stories on the prodigy, whom the Times cal ed the “Torrance Tempest” and practical y everyone else cal ed the “Torrance Tornado.” By one report, stories on Louie were such an important source of revenue to the Torrance Herald that the newspaper insured his legs for $50,000. Torrancers carpooled to his races and crammed the grandstands. Embarrassed by the fuss, Louie asked his parents not to watch him race. Louise came anyway, sneaking to the track to peer through the fence, but the races made her so nervous that she had to hide her eyes.

Not long ago, Louie’s aspirations had ended at whose kitchen he might burgle. Now he latched onto a wildly audacious goal: the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin. The Games had no mile race, so milers ran the 1,500 meters, about 120 yards short of a mile. It was a seasoned man’s game; most top milers of the era peaked in their mid-twenties or later. As of 1934, the Olympic 1,500-meter favorite was Glenn Cunningham, who’d set the world record in the mile, 4:06.8, just weeks after Louie set the national high school record. Cunningham had been racing since the fourth grade, and at the 1936 Games, he would be just short of twenty-seven. He wouldn’t run his fastest mile until he was twenty-eight. As of 1936, Louie would have only five years’ experience, and would be only nineteen.

But Louie was already the fastest high school miler in American history, and he was improving so rapidly that he had lopped forty-two seconds off his time in two years. His record mile, run when he was seventeen, was three and a half seconds faster than Cunningham’s fastest high school mile, run when he was twenty.* Even conservative track pundits were beginning to think that Louie might be the one to shatter precedent, and after Louie won every race in his senior season, their confidence was strengthened. Louie believed he could do it, and so did Pete. Louie wanted to run in Berlin more than he had ever wanted anything.

In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts ful of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous col ege scholarships being offered to him.

Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation’s top ten col ege milers. He urged Louie to accept USC’s offer but delay entry until the fal , so he could train ful -time. So Louie moved into Pete’s frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. Al day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin.

In the spring, he began to realize that he wasn’t going to make it. Though he was getting faster by the day, he couldn’t force his body to improve quickly enough to catch his older rivals by summer. He was simply too young. He was heartbroken.

——

In May, Louie was leafing through a newspaper when he saw a story on the Compton Open, a prestigious track meet to be held at the Los Angeles Coliseum on May 22. The headliner in the 5,000 meters—three miles and 188 yards—was Norman Bright, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher. Bright had set the American two-mile record in 1935 and was America’s second-fastest 5,000-meter man, behind the legendary Don Lash, Indiana University’s twenty-three-year-old record-smashing machine. America would send three 5,000-meter men to Berlin, and Lash and Bright were considered locks. Pete urged Louie to enter the Compton Open and try his legs at a longer distance. “If you stay with Norman Bright,” he told Louie, “you make the Olympic team.”

The idea was a stretch. The mile was four laps of the track; the 5,000 was more than twelve, what Louie would describe as a “fifteen-minute torture chamber,” wel over three times his optimal distance. He had only twice raced beyond a mile, and the 5,000, like the mile, was dominated by much older men. He had only two weeks to train for Compton and, with the Olympic trials in July, two months to become America’s youngest elite 5,000-meter man.

But he had nothing to lose. He trained so hard that he rubbed the skin right off one of his toes, leaving his sock bloody.

The race, contested before ten thousand fans, was a barn burner. Louie and Bright took off together, leaving the field far behind. Each time one took the lead, the other would gun past him again and the crowd would roar. They turned into the homestretch for the last time dead together, Bright inside, Louie outside. Ahead, a runner named John Casey was on the verge of being lapped. Officials waved at Casey, who tried to yield, but Bright and Louie came to him before he could get out of the way. Bright squeezed through on the inside, but Louie had to shift right to go around Casey. Confused, Casey veered farther right, carrying Louie out. Louie sped up to go around him, but Casey sped up also, carrying Louie most of the way toward the grandstand. Final y, Louie took a half step to cut inside, lost his balance, and dropped one hand to the ground. Bright now had an advantage that looked, to Pete’s eye, to be several yards. Louie took off after him, gaining rapidly. With the crowd on its feet and screaming, Louie caught Bright at the tape. He was a beat too late: Bright won by a glimmer. He and Louie had clipped out the fastest 5,000 run in America in 1936. Louie’s Olympic dream was on again.