Louis Zamperini was one of the war’s most interesting characters. After some troubled teenage years he became a well-known distance runner and made the 1936 Olympic team. During the games he so impressed Adolf Hitler that he was summoned for an audience. In 1941 he volunteered for the Army Air Corps and earned his wings as a navigator on B-24 bombers. His squadron deployed to the Pacific and flew long-range missions out of different island bases.
On May 27, 1943, he was with his crew on a search-and-rescue mission looking for a lost B-25. Flying low due to cloud cover, his B-24 suddenly lost power to one engine. When an inexperienced engineer shut down the other good engine on that wing, the aircraft went out of control. Zamperini described the feeling:
The most frightening experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster with one important difference. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. You think, this is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 per cent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope. What happens is up to God.203
After sinking with the aircraft, tangled in severed control cables and seemingly trapped, Zamperini lost consciousness. He woke suddenly to find himself free of the aircraft and swimming more than seventy feet back to the surface. He and two others survived the crash to begin a separate ordeal adrift in a life raft. He was convinced that God was looking out for him throughout this experience.
There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
May 26
Louis Zamperini and two other crewmen amazingly survived the crash of their B-24 in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. With two small life rafts, six bars of chocolate, and eight half-pints of water, they started one of the longest survival ordeals ever recorded.
For forty-seven days they faced hunger, thirst, storms, and attack by an enemy aircraft. Sharks were with them constantly, often bumping the raft. A constant lack of water seemed to be the most trying part of their ordeal. They were often tantalized by showers that passed by just too far away, as they exhausted themselves trying to row toward them. Trying to fight dehydration, one would tread water beside the raft while the other two fought off the sharks with paddles. They came to a point of crisis after seven days without water. They were ready to try anything, as Zamperini related:
In the end, we resorted to prayer.
When I prayed, I meant it. I didn’t understand it, but I meant it. I knew from church that there was a God and that he’d made the heavens and the earth, but beyond that I wasn’t familiar with the Bible because in those days we Catholics, unlike Protestants, weren’t encouraged to read it carefully at least in my church we weren’t. Yet on the raft, I was like anybody else, from the native who lived thousands of years ago on a remote island to the atheist in a foxhole: when I got to the end of my rope, I looked up.204
The three men prayed specifically for water. Within an hour a squall was heading for them, and this time did not veer away. They drank until they could drink no more. They didn’t know if they had received a miracle or not, but they decided not to take any chances. Their prayers became a daily and serious matter.
I lift up my eyes to the hills where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
May 27
Lou Zamperini was “saved” from his liferaft ordeal by a Japanese patrol boat. He spent the rest of the war in prison camps where he endured even worse deprivations, losing the faith that he had found on the life raft. As he put it, “ I believed that my date with death was set. ”205 He lived, but without hope. His day-to-day existence was filled with fear and hatred.
Zamperini returned home after the war to a welcoming family and a certain amount of fame. He was soon married and seemed on his way back to a normal life, at least on the surface. All the while, however, he had recurring nightmares of his prison experiences. He tried to drown his bitterness in alcohol. Excessive drinking, business failures, and marital problems led to an inevitable downward spiral. He occasionally thought of God in his hopelessness, but he now blamed God for deserting him.
On a September day in 1949, Zamperini’s wife insisted he go with her to a meeting in a tent on the corner of Washington and Hill Streets in downtown Los Angeles. The speaker was a little-known preacher named Billy Graham. Under great protest, he went, and, with great antipathy, listened. Little by little, he was convicted by Graham’s patient and persistent presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Earlier in his life he had been an Olympic runner. He now realized that he was in another kind of race, a race for his life:
I dropped to my knees and for the first time in my life truly humbled myself before the Lord. I asked Him to forgive me for not having kept the promises I’d made during the war, and for my sinful life. I made no excuses. I did not rationalize, I did not blame. He had said, “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved,” so I took Him at His word, begged for His pardon, and asked Jesus to come into my life.206
Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
May 28
One night three natives came through the Marine lines on Guadalcanal, asking for the ”priest-man.” They were taken to Father Frederic Gehring’s tent, where they presented the chaplain with a badly wounded child. He was horrified to see a five- or six-year-old girl who had been bayoneted, smashed in the head with a rifle butt, and consumed now with fever. A corpsman applied bandages to stop the bleeding. A doctor arrived later and was even
