As his battered bomber hurtled towards the Pacific in May 1943, Louis Zamperini thought to himself that no one was going to survive the crash. If he had had the slightest inkling of what lay ahead of him, he readily admits that he might have preferred death, staying beneath the surface of the water rather than wrestling his way from the wreckage as it sank.
Clambering into a life raft floating amid the blood and wreckage, he knew the odds were bad. Search planes were more likely to crash — just as his barely airworthy B-24 had — than rescue downed airmen. Only three of the crew survived — and one had a severe head injury, while the other was so traumatised that he wailed ‘We’re going to die’ until slapped, then scoffed their only food, a handful of chocolate bars, when night fell.
They ended up drifting for 47 days — enduring 13 days longer than the previous known record on an inflated raft. Tormented by hunger and thirst, their sunburned lips swollen grotesquely, they lived off raw albatross and rainwater trapped during the occasional shower. At one stage they had to patch their flimsy craft while fighting off sharks and being strafed with gunfire by a passing Japanese aircraft. By the time of their rescue, the two survivors had each lost half their body weight.
And that was just the start of their troubles. Ahead lay the horrors of Japanese captivity, with the emaciated Zamperini being beaten, humiliated and tortured — but never quite broken. He is picked upon by The Bird, ‘the most vicious guard in any prison camp’, according to one of his superiors — who is distinguished by both his depravity and his fleeting, quasi-sexual affection for his victims.
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