Classic Replay | A Visit with an American Hero: The Story of Louis Zamperini Part 1

Louie Zamperini, welcome to Harvest. We're privileged to have you here tonight. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you. It was a privilege.

Looking forward to it. Well, right. Louie, you had a couple of things you wanted to say.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I've had a lot of great races in my life. Exciting races, but I'd say the most emotional run of my life was in Nagano, Japan during the Winter Olympics in 98, where CBS did a 45-minute video, carrying the Olympic torch in Noetsu, Japan, and carrying the torch alongside of my former slave labor camp. It was very emotional.

The mayor of Noetsu had sent me an email, and he said, when you come to Japan to carry the torch, we will line the streets and cheer you on. And it wasn't a place you could stand. It was just jammed for a mile. And then he said, can you come before the city council and answer questions? I said, yeah.

Well, the final question came from him. And he said, tell me, Mr. Zamperini, did anything good come out of your being a prisoner of war for two and a half years in Japan? I said, yeah, it prepared me for 55 years of married life. I was going to say it enhanced my tolerance for pain.

They didn't want to hurt his feelings. But the truth of the matter is, when you look back, all things do work together for good because if the bird hadn't been so vicious toward me for so long, I would not have had post-traumatic stress as I did and probably would have became an alcoholic. And I probably wouldn't have gone to the Billy Graham meeting. So, yes, I can thank Mrs. Shirawachan Nabi for actually pointing me to the cross.

Yes, amen. Well, Lou, you were born where? Where were you born? Only in New York. But you spent a good deal of your childhood in Torrance, California, correct?

Right. And you, your brother, your older brother, Pete, was a runner and he got you running and pretty soon you were winning races and you got a nickname. Do you remember what your nickname was? Well, I called it Torrance Tornado. The Torrance Tornado.

Yeah. But you were also a little bit of a hooligan, weren't you? You got into some trouble and the police would chase you. Why did you get in trouble all the time? Well, I was really a rotten kid and my brother tolerated me and he tried to help me. Finally the chief of police brought me to the jail and he showed me two guys locked up and he said, someday you're going to be behind those bars. He said those two guys have lost the greatest treasure of their life, freedom.

And that really shook me up. And my brother said, well, we got to get him out for some kind of sport and the chief said, well, may I suggest running? We've been chasing him all over town for years. So you started running and you started winning races and soon you qualified to go to the 1936 Olympics in Germany and run in an Olympic event. Yeah, well, I was too young for the 1936 Olympics, but just out of a lark I ran against the second best 5,000 meter runner in the country. And I passed him coming down the home stretch, but I collided with a guy.

We were lapping and I fell on the ground. So I had to catch him again and he beat me about an inch. So I knew I could beat him. And that qualified me for this. But then again, during the Depression, athletes didn't know how to get to New York. I finally got a ride on the Southern Pacific because my dad worked for the big red cars and they had an association with the train. But every time I went to a different state, it was like going to a foreign country. And then in New York, we had to team up and get rooms, train hard, and you either make the team or you don't. It was the hottest day in New York.

It had in about 90 years and letters were collapsing. But finally, in the 5,000 meter, I'm running against the world's record holder for the two mile. My brother said, get behind him and keep your eyes on the back of his head and then make your final sprint the last 220. Well, I kept my eyes on the back of his head and I waited too long to pass him.

Well, you look at a world champion for a kid like me, I couldn't pass a world champion. But finally, he was in the first lane, his buddy was in the second lane. And so I had to run the last 220 in the third lane, which means I ran about 12 yards further.

But I caught him and we came out of dead heat. So I put me on the team and I from the hotel to the boat. The amazing thing about the hotel was I wrote my mother a card, which I still have. And I said, Mom, you won't believe it.

They have a radio in every room. And you ran so fast in that event, though you got eighth place, you ran so fast. Adolf Hitler wanted to meet you and you shook hands with Hitler. It's amazing that I even finished the race. I gained 14 pounds. Any time they get on a boat, you're going to gain weight. And I couldn't lose the weight and time.

I thought that they had all these different cuisines for the different nations, and I had to try them all. So I couldn't keep up the pace. The last lap I was about 50 yards behind the winners in a pack of runners. And I finally decided to do what my brother told me to do. The last lap comes, everybody's tired.

But isn't one minute of pain worth a lifetime of glory? So I sprinted the whole last lap in 56 seconds. Grandstand people stood up. And of course that caught Hitler's attention. And then the next day I was asked to meet Hitler. I think it was Goren. And I just reached up, touched his hand, and he said, through an interpreter, he said the boy was a fast finish.

That was it. And we had no idea really who this man was going to turn into at that point. Well, all of Germany was military, even the Boy Scouts. So we knew he was up to something, but we figured he wanted to take a country, not the world.

And I think most of the world knew it, but nobody wanted to get involved until it was too late. So while you were there in Germany, you saw a Nazi flag on a pole that you wanted to get for yourself. And what did you do with that flag? Did you get it? Well, yes, because all the others were collecting souvenirs.

And during my teenage pastime, it was easier for me to pick up stuff. How high up was this flag? This is the actual flag right here. Probably about eight feet on the wall in front of the Chancellery. And I was very careful to time the guards as they marched back and forth. The actual flag.

I couldn't reach it when I got to it, and that killed time. And when the guards started to scream at me, I jumped as high as I could and clutched my hand, ripped it from the pole, and started to run. Then I heard a shot.

A rifle shot. Then I heard the words, Halt and see, halt and see. And I didn't need an interpreter. And the guards came up and spun me around rather rudely until they saw the Olympic flag in my pocket, and the American flag, and then they were more gentle. And then the one guard asked me.

He spoke very poor English, but I could understand him. Why did you tear down this swastika? Now, we had two Jewish athletes on the team. I think they might have thought I was one of those. And I just said I just wanted to take the flag home to America to always remind me of the wonderful time I had in your country. So World War II has broken out. You've enlisted to serve in the military. What was your position on the plane? I was a bombardier. And the first plane you were on, it was called Superman? Superman.

Right. So then you were transferred over to another plane, kind of a rickety, broken-down plane called the Green Hornet. And you were shot down over the Pacific.

Well, actually we weren't shot down. We were searching for another plane that had crashed north of Palmyra. And they assured us the plane passed inspection, but nobody wanted to fly it.

It was what they called a musher. And one motor quit, and we had to feather the motor. And the engineer, a brand-new engineer, rushed up to feather the motor, and he feathered the wrong motor. And the plane wouldn't hardly fly on four. And with one motor out, it was dropping already. With two out on the same side, that wing dropped.

Because you're giving full power on the right side, you're trying to keep the law. So we hit the water at an angle of about 45 degrees, and the plane just blew up into the Pacific. And I don't know how anybody survived, but the pilot and tail gunner were blowing free of the wreckage. I was trapped in the waste section.

My job is to get a raft and stand behind the tripod of the machine gun mount. And now before the plane hits, you want to duck down low with the light back against your shoulder. And I ended up under the tripod, severely wedged in and painfully wedged in, where I couldn't move.

I doubt if four men could have broken me loose in that position. It just brutally wedged in. And then to make matters worse, the tail snapped off and the control wires go within an inch and a half of the tripod. Those were very springy wires, and they coiled up all around me. So I'm completely entangled in wires around my hopeless situation, so I knew this was it.

I'm going to die. And as the plane sank, I felt my ears pop, so I knew I was down 20 feet. And then I kept thinking deeper and deeper. My head started to get painful, and then I felt a sharp pain in my forehead. And I don't know how deep I was down, maybe 100 or 200 feet. I lost consciousness. Now before I lost consciousness, I prayed in my mind, in my heart, in my body, God help me.

That's all I could say. I'm out cold. The next thing is I'm completely free to loosen from wires and the tripod. And for one brief second, I just thought this is the afterlife. And then I realized I was fighting for my breath. Now my body is buoyant, and the plane is sinking fast. I reached around and my USC ring snagged onto the window. And the pressure of my body floating upwards and the plane going down, I bent the plane over and cut into the boat.

I couldn't let go, thank God. So I pulled myself down, arched my back out the window, just skinned off my back. And then it seemed like forever getting to the surface, swallowing gas, oil, and blood. Got to the surface and there's my two buddies hanging onto a gas tank. And that was probably the nearest death I'd ever been in my life. And I've had two narrow escapes. Let me just say this, several ministers and Bible teachers had sent me scripture from the Psalms.

I think it was 18. And I just about died when I read it. The chords of death entangled me.

Do you remember that one? The source of destruction overwhelmed me. The chords of the grave coiled around me. The snares of death confronted me. In my distress, I cried to the Lord. I called on my God for help. And from the temple on high, He heard my voice. It came before Him and into His ears. He reached down from on high, took hold of me, and drew me out of deep waters.

I said, it really dripped. Wow, so perfect. Unbelievable. So the pilot, Russell Allen Phillips, the tail gunner, Francis McNamara, who you called Mac, and you, Louis Zamperini, survived it. Now you're in a raft at sea. You ended up being in that raft for how many days?

About 47 days. Did you think you would ever get off that raft? Well, it's funny. People say, mostly young people, did you ever think about dying? I said, no, I was too occupied thinking about living. No, I never thought about dying out there, even though the tail gunner died, we buried him at sea. I'd had a lot of survival training. And mountaineer, glacier climber, and I took survival courses in Hawaii. I was an Eagle Scout. I took advanced first aid in college, so I was prepared for an ordeal like that.

I was just too busy, not only doing what I was trained to do, but improvising. Right, and Albatross came along and landed on your boat, and you were able to get hold of that thing, kill it, eat it, and make fish hooks out of its bones? Yeah. Well, he got a hold of me too. All those white scars on my knuckles are from the birds. Really? Three different birds.

You grab them by the leg, you have to get up there slowly, take about a minute to get there, and then you grab them by the legs and they have a neck as big as your arm, and then with their serrated beak, with the eagle's tip on it, boy, they go at you like a wild animal. And so I took a beating on my hands. But as you're on this raft, you would talk with your raft mates about meals you would have at home, and you're raised in an Italian home, so you would talk in detail about how the meal would be made and the ingredients, and this helped you along a bit? Well, it helped because when I was in college, my professor told me that the brain is like a muscle.

If you don't keep it active, it will atrophy. And so I made sure that we did something mental every day on the raft. Now, the tail gunner was a total loss, and we thought, well, he'll hallucinate.

But by doing these mental exercises every day, reminiscing in the future, memorizing words to songs, teaching each other what we knew about in our profession, at the end of 33 days when he died, he was the sharpest he's ever been in his life. You were at sea, adrift at sea for, was it 47 days? And here's a description from your book written by Laura Hildebrand about what happened. Looking over the side of the raft, they saw it. Swelling up from under the water came a leviathan, a vast white mouth, a broad back parting the surface, a long dorsal fin, ghostly in the moonlight. The animal was some 20 feet long, more than three times the length of the raft.

Louie recognized its features from his survival school training. It was a great white shark. So that wasn't the only shark. The sharks were circling. They were coming up underneath the raft, and pretty soon they were coming into the raft. But you took care of one of those sharks or a few, didn't you? The thing is, I was never scared on the raft except for that great white because he actually, we were trying to sleep. But we put four inches of water in the raft because our bodies warmed that a little bit, so it's better than the ocean. The shark came up, slapped us on the bottom, lifted us out of the water, three guys in the raft.

I thought it was a submarine. And then I saw the sharks swimming around and I thought, don't make a sound. Now the shark was like a human being. Every time he went a long way to the raft, he would take his tail and put water on us to see what we were.

He did that about eight or ten times. We just sat motionless, no sound, and he finally disappeared just like he came. That was scary. Because he was big enough to bite the raft in two and take a fall. But you had to eat, and these sharks were trying to eat you, and so you decided to turn the tables on the sharks and you ate them.

That was really ironic. The other two guys were sleeping and I was awake and I kept watching these. There's always two sharks for some reason. And they kept circling around, circling, that's all they do. And so I thought, well, it would kind of be like one with nature if I could touch one of them. So I put my hand over his head when he went by. My hand went over his dorsal fin and I thought, hey, that's neat.

At one with nature, as they say. And I did that to both sharks twice. And then all of a sudden, and this was unusual and never happened before, they both disappeared. There was always two sharks.

Nothing scared them away, but these two disappeared. Now I'm on my knees looking to see where they are and this head comes up out of the water, mouth open. And it was like a demon out of hell.

I mean, it just scared me. And I just inadvertently put my hands up. Well, I had it high enough so the shark's mouth, when he opens his mouth, his snoot is about a foot ahead of his mouth. And he turns that up. Well, I got him on the top of the nose and pushed him back in. And then the tail gunner couldn't figure out what was happening. He woke up, grabbed an oar. I grabbed an oar and I tell you, for the next ten minutes, they kept trying to jump in the ramp and kept jabbing him with the oar.

And they did fine. I gave up and they left. Well, what that did to me, it made me really mad. And being Italian, I wanted to get even. And so I decided to make them part of our food chain.

I mean, I'm biting off more than we could chew. So I waited for a small shark. The next day, a five-footer came by and I thought, well, that's not small, but I'll try my luck. So when he came by and the raft slowly circling, I reached in and grabbed him by the tail. But I didn't get his tail out of the water fast enough and he pulled me in. And I got out fast, yeah. And so then I waited.

The next day, a four-footer was there and I thought, well, he's still pretty big, but I'll make it try. So we have a parachute flare cartridge. When you pull the shark out of the water, immediately their mouth opens. And so I said, I'm going to pull his tail out quickly, pull him in the raft, and before he bites the raft or any of us, put the cartridge in his mouth.

And it happened perfectly. I pulled him in and the pilot took the casing into his mouth and he clamped down on it and wouldn't let go. And then I had a pair of pliers on the raft. Now, after 47 days, we couldn't figure out what the pliers were for. And we had a packing kit, like a bicycle-patching kit. And you used sandpaper to rough up the rubber to make the patch stick. That's what they had, sandpaper, and the sand was on the bottom and the paper was blank. They should have had waterproof emery cloth.

Everything was wrong about this raft. And so we began to look around for the trademark and we thought they had to be made in Germany or Japan. So I took the brass mirror and I made three big teeth marks on the edge of the mirror. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes to open a hole in the belly of that five-foot shark.

They are tough. So we had a lovely dinner of raw liver. Twenty percent of the shark is liver, so you got a lot of liver. Before World War II, all vitamins and pills were made from shark liver. And I knew how nutritious it was, but survival school said you don't eat the meat unless it's cooked.

It smells like ammonia. And then about a week later, we caught another shark, a little smaller, four-footer. We had two luscious meals on the raft. As you can imagine, there's much more to the story of the late Louis Zamperini. Next time here on A New Beginning, we'll hear more of this interview as Pastor Greg Laurie talks to him about his rescue from the raft only to wind up in a Japanese concentration camp. And after the war ended, he found himself in a prison of a different kind, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder, until he hears the preaching of a young man named Billy Graham. That's all coming up next time, along with some important words from Pastor Greg about the value of forgiveness.