Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (7 page)

Two guards paced the apron before the Chancel ery. Watching them walk, Louie noted that on each pass, there was a point at which both had their backs to the flag. As the soldiers turned, Louie ran to the flag and immediately realized that it was much higher than he had thought. He began jumping in the air, trying to catch the edge of it. He became so absorbed in his task that he forgot about the guards, who ran toward him, shouting. Taking one last lunge for the flag, Louie snagged the edge and fel to the pavement, tearing the banner down with him, then scrambled to his feet and ran like mad.

He heard a crack! Behind him, a guard was running at him, his gun pointed at the sky, yel ing, “Halten Sie!” That much Louie understood. He stopped.

The guard grabbed his shoulder, spun him around, saw his Olympic uniform, and hesitated. He asked Louie his name. The one thing that Louie knew about Nazis was that they were anti-Semitic, so when he gave his name, he delivered it in an exaggeratedly Italian fashion, rol ing the r, he would say, “for about two minutes.”

The guards conferred, went inside, and came out with someone who looked more important than they. The new German asked him why he had stolen the flag. Louie, laying it on thick, replied that he wanted a souvenir of the happy time he had had in beautiful Germany. The Germans gave him the flag and let him go.

When the press got wind of Louie’s adventure, reporters took creative liberties. Louie had “stormed Hitler’s palace” to steal the flag in a hail of gunfire that had “whistled around his head.” Plunging “eighteen feet,” he had raced away, pursued by “two columns” of armed guards, who had tackled and beat him. Just as a German rifle butt had been about to crush Louie’s head, the German army’s commander in chief had halted the attack, and Louie had talked the general into sparing his life. In one version, Hitler himself had al owed him to keep the flag. In another, Louie had concealed the flag so cleverly that it was never discovered. He had done it al , went the story, to win the heart of a girl.

——

On August 11, Louie packed his belongings, the flag, and an array of other stolen Teutonica and left his room in the Olympic Vil age. The Games were winding down, and the track athletes were leaving early to compete in meets in England and Scotland. A few days later, fireworks brought the Games to a booming close. Hitler’s show had gone without a hitch. The world was ful of praise.

The American basketbal player Frank Lubin lingered in Berlin for a few days. His German hosts had invited him out to dinner, so they cruised the streets in search of a restaurant. A pretty place caught Lubin’s eye, but when he suggested it, his hosts balked: a Star of David hung in the window. To be seen there, they said, “might prove harmful to us.” The group found a gentile restaurant, then visited a public swimming pool. As they walked in, Lubin saw a sign reading JUDEN VERBOTEN. The sign hadn’t been there during the Games. Al over Berlin, such signs were reappearing, and the Nazis’ virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, nowhere to be seen during the Games, was back on newsstands. Lubin had won a gold medal in Berlin, but when he left, he felt only relief. Something terrible was coming.

The Olympic Vil age wasn’t empty for long. The cottages became military barracks. With the Olympics over and his usefulness for propaganda expended, the vil age’s designer, Captain Fürstner, learned that he was to be cashiered from the Wehrmacht because he was a Jew. He kil ed himself.

Less than twenty miles away, in the town of Oranienburg, the first prisoners were being hauled into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

——

On the evening of September 2, when Louie arrived in Torrance, he was plunked onto a throne on the flatbed of a truck and paraded to the depot, where four thousand people, whipped up by a band, sirens, and factory whistles, cheered. Louie shook hands and grinned for pictures. “I didn’t only start too slow,” he said, “I ran too slow.”

As he settled back into home, Louie thought of what lay ahead. Running the 1936 Olympic 5,000 at nineteen on four races’ experience had been a shot at the moon. Running the 1940 Olympic 1,500 at twenty-three after years of training would be another matter. The same thought was circling in Pete’s mind. Louie could win gold in 1940, and both brothers knew it.

A few weeks before, officials had announced which city would host the 1940 Games. Louie shaped his dreams around Tokyo, Japan.

* Louie would later recal eating at a restaurant only once, when a family friend bought him a sandwich at a lunch counter, but according to his Olympic diary, after his 5,000-meter trial, a fan treated him to dinner in a Manhattan skyscraper. The meal cost $7, a staggering sum to Louie, who had been diary, after his 5,000-meter trial, a fan treated him to dinner in a Manhattan skyscraper. The meal cost $7, a staggering sum to Louie, who had been paying between 65 cents and $1.35 for his dinners, careful y recording the prices in his diary.

Five

Into War

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOUIE found himself on a campus infested with world-class track athletes. He spent mornings in class and afternoons training with his best friend, Payton Jordan. A sensational y fast sprinter, Jordan had seen nothing but Jesse Owens’s back at the 1936

Olympic trials and, like Louie, was aiming for gold in Tokyo. In the evenings, Louie, Jordan, and their teammates wedged into Louie’s ’31 Ford and drove to Torrance for Louise Zamperini’s spaghetti, considering themselves so close to family that Sylvia once found a high jumper asleep on her bed. In his spare time, Louie crashed society weddings, worked as a movie extra, and harassed his housemates with practical jokes, replacing their deviled ham with cat food and milk with milk of magnesia. He pursued coeds by al means necessary, once landing a date with a beauty by hurling himself into the side of her car, then pretending to have been struck.

Between classes, Louie, Jordan, and their friends congregated near the administration building, sitting at the foot of the statue of Tommy Trojan, the symbol of USC. On some days, they were joined by a neatly dressed Japanese émigré who lingered on the edges of the group. His name was Kunichi James Sasaki. Known as Jimmie, he had come to America in his late teens and settled in Palo Alto, where he had endured the social misery of attending elementary school as an adult. Among Louie’s friends, no one would remember what Sasaki studied at USC, but they al recal ed his quiet, anodyne presence; saying almost nothing, he smiled without interruption.

Sasaki was an ardent track fan, and he sought Louie’s acquaintance. Louie was especial y impressed with Sasaki’s scholarliness; prior to coming to USC, Jimmie said, he had earned degrees at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Bonding over shared interests in sports and music, the two became good friends.

Training for the Olympics, 1940. Bettmann/Corbis

Louie and Jimmie had something else in common. Sometime over the course of the friendship, Louie learned that his friend was making daily trips to Torrance. He asked Jimmie if he lived there, and Jimmie said no. He explained that he was concerned about the poverty of his Japanese homeland and was going to Torrance to give lectures to locals of Japanese ancestry, encouraging them to send money and foil from cigarette packs and gum wrappers to Japan to help the poor. Louie admired his friend for his efforts, but found it odd that he would travel to Torrance every day, given how few Japanese lived there.

Jimmie Sasaki wasn’t what he seemed. He had never attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. His friends thought him about thirty; he was in fact nearly forty. He had a wife and two daughters, though neither Louie nor his friends knew that they existed. Though he spent a lot of time on campus and led everyone to believe that he was a student, he was not. He had graduated from USC some ten years earlier, with a B.A. in political science. Neither Louie nor anyone else knew that Jimmie’s attempts to pass as a student were apparently an elaborate ruse.

——

On USC’s track team, Louie was a juggernaut. Focused on winning in Tokyo in 1940, he smashed record after record at multiple distances and routinely buried his competition by giant margins, once winning a race by one hundred yards. By the spring of 1938, he’d whittled his mile time down to 4:13.7, some seven seconds off the world record, which now stood at 4:06.4. His coach predicted that Louie would take that record down. The only runner who could beat him, the coach said, was Seabiscuit.

One afternoon in 1938, Glenn Cunningham stood in the Los Angeles Coliseum locker room, talking with reporters after winning a race. “There’s the next mile champion,” he said, leveling his eyes across the room. “When he concentrates on this distance, he’l be unbeatable.” The reporters turned to see who Cunningham was looking at. It was Louie, blushing to the roots of his hair.

In the 1930s, track experts were beginning to toss around the idea of a four-minute mile. Most observers, including Cunningham, had long believed that it couldn’t be done. In 1935, when Cunningham’s record of 4:06.7 reigned, science weighed in. Studying data on human structural limits compiled by Finnish mathematicians, famed track coach Brutus Hamilton penned an article for Amateur Athlete magazine stating that a four-minute mile was impossible. The fastest a human could run a mile, he wrote, was 4:01.6.

Pete disagreed. Since the Olympics, he’d been certain that Louie had a four-minute mile in him. Louie had always shaken this off, but in the spring of

’38, he reconsidered. His coach had forbidden him to run hil s on the mistaken but common belief that it would damage his heart, but Louie didn’t buy the warnings. Every night that May, he climbed the coliseum fence, dropped into the stadium, and ran the stairs until his legs went numb. By June, his body was humming, capable of speed and stamina beyond anything he’d ever known. He began to think that Pete was right, and he wasn’t alone. Running

pundits, including Olympic champion sprinter Charlie Paddock, published articles stating that Louie could be the first four-minute man. Cunningham, too, had changed his mind. He thought that four minutes might be within Louie’s reach. Zamperini, Cunningham told a reporter, was more likely to crack four minutes than he was.

In June 1938, Louie arrived at the NCAA Championships in Minneapolis, gunning for four minutes. Spil ing over with eagerness, he babbled to other athletes about his new training regimen, his race strategy, and how fast he might go. Word spread that Louie was primed for a superlative performance.

On the night before the race, a coach from Notre Dame knocked on Louie’s hotel room door, a grave expression on his face. He told Louie that some of his rival coaches were ordering their runners to sharpen their spikes and slash him. Louie dismissed the warning, certain that no one would do such a thing deliberately.

He was wrong. Halfway through the race, just as Louie was about to move for the lead, several runners shouldered around him, boxing him in. Louie tried repeatedly to break loose, but he couldn’t get around the other men. Suddenly, the man beside him swerved in and stomped on his foot, impaling Louie’s toe with his spike. A moment later, the man ahead began kicking backward, cutting both of Louie’s shins. A third man elbowed Louie’s chest so hard that he cracked Louie’s rib. The crowd gasped.

Bleeding and in pain, Louie was trapped. For a lap and a half, he ran in the cluster of men, unable to get free, restraining his stride to avoid running into the man ahead. At last, as he neared the final turn, he saw a tiny gap open before him. He burst through, blew past the race leader, and, with his shoe torn open, shins streaming blood, and chest aching, won easily.

He slowed to a halt, bitter and frustrated. When his coach asked him how fast he thought he had gone, Louie replied that he couldn’t have beaten 4:20.

The race time was posted on the board. From the stands came a sudden Woooo! Louie had run the mile in 4:08.3. It was the fastest NCAA mile in history and the fifth-fastest outdoor mile ever run. Louie had missed the world record by 1.9 seconds. His time would stand as the NCAA record for fifteen years.